The Flickr Haagconvention Image Generatr

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

I know all too well just what you're like!
I don't want your love, I just wanna fight!

- Wet Leg: Catch These Fists (2025) [UK]

Kamera: Olympus µ[mju:]-II Zoom 80
Linse: Olympus 38-80mm, f/4.5-8.9
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Middle East Eye: Holding Israeli soldiers accountable worldwide for war crimes (Publ. 10 April 2025)


Washington, D.C. / Brussels, April 17, 2025: The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a request for prosecution in the United States against Yuval Shatel, an Israeli soldier from the [exclusively jewish ultra-orthodox (Haredi)] 435th Rotem Battalion of the Givati Brigade accused of serious violations of international humanitarian law during Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. *Last seen in Texas* - Read More -

London, April 16, 2025: - An arrest warrant is being urgently sought for a senior member of Israel’s security cabinet, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar (b. 1966) during his visit to the UK. The charges focus in particular on the siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital at the end of 2024, which culminated in the abduction and torture of the hospital director, Dr Hussam Abu Safiyeh (b. 1973). - Read More -

Bucharest, March 31, 2025 - Today, the Hind Rajab Foundation, through its legal representative, has filed a criminal complaint before the Romanian Prosecutor’s Office attached to the High Court of Cassation and Justice against Orel Benyaish, an Israeli soldier from the 432nd Battalion of the Givati Brigade. He is accused of committing war crimes and acts of genocide during Israel’s ongoing military operations in the Gaza Strip. - Read More -

Brussels, March 29, 2025 – The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against Barel Kriel, a German-Israeli dual national and a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), for his involvement in serious war crimes committed during Israel’s military assault on Gaza. Despite the visual and testimonial evidence submitted, the German Prosecution has so far refused to open an investigation—failing to apply both German national law and its obligations under international law. - Read More -

24/3/2025 - Kathmandu, Nepal – The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has officially filed a formal request with the Nepalese authorities to immediately arrest Lieutenant Amit Nechmya and extradite him to Argentina, where a legal case remains open against him for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. - Read More -

5/3/2025 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has officially filed a criminal complaint against Shay Friedman, an Israeli soldier suspected of participating in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The complaint, submitted to the German authorities, outlines serious allegations, including aiding and abetting murder, genocide, and other grave offences under both German and international law. - Read More -

16/2/2025 – The Hague / Brussels - The Hind Rajab Foundation has officially filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC), seeking an arrest warrant for Gideon Sa’ar (b. 1966), the Foreign Minister of Israel, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023.
Sa’ar, a senior member of Netanyahu’s government and a key figure in Israel’s decision-making, has played a central role in shaping and implementing policies that have led to mass displacement, collective punishment, and systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians. His public statements and policy endorsements indicate direct and indirect participation in these crimes, as well as incitement to violence and obstruction of international justice mechanisms. - Read More -

11/2/2025 - Dossier: The Yuval Vagdani Case –– How Filming Home Demolitions in Gaza Forced Vagdani to Flee His Holiday Destination Brazil. This article recounts the key details of the international criminal case filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) in Brazil against Yuval Vagdani, tracing the pivotal moments and their aftermath. After participating in civilian home demolitions in Gaza—posing and smiling for pictures while planting explosives and laughing amid the destruction—Vagdani decided to take a vacation in Brazil. Despite his actions, which amount to war crimes under international law, he believed himself untouchable, far from the reach of accountability. Little did he know, what was to come. - Read More -

8/2/2025 - The HRF filed a case with the ICC requesting the issuing of an arrest warrant for one of the IDF's most notorious war criminals. The name of Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, commander of the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) 252nd Division, has become synonymous with unrestrained brutality, sadism, and corruption. His deliberate and systematic targeting of Palestinian civilians, particularly in the Netzarim Corridor, amounts to genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes under the Rome Statute. - Read More -

5/2/2025 - Bern, Switzerland – The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) confirms that it has formally filed a criminal complaint before Swiss authorities, leading to the opening of an investigation into a suspected Israeli war criminal currently present in Switzerland. The complaint provides extensive evidence implicating the individual in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including attacks on civilians, destruction of homes and hospitals, forced displacement, and other grave violations of international law committed in the Gaza Strip. - Read More -

28/1/2025 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has initiated a groundbreaking legal action in Belgium by filing a formal criminal complaint against Amichai Chikli (b. 1981), Israel's Minister for Diaspora Affairs and the Fight Against Antisemitism. The complaint, submitted by Dyab Abou Jahjah (b. 1971), president of the foundation, accuses Minister Chikli of making terrorist threats against him, a Belgian national, with the intent to intimidate and suppress the foundation’s advocacy for justice and accountability for war crimes. - Read More -

23/1/2025 - The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has filed a complaint with the ICC and called for the immediate arrest of Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, an Israeli soldier in the Givati Brigade, based on his individual criminal responsibility under Article 25(3)(a) of the Rome Statute. Zarbiv stands accused of committing grave war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which began in October 2023. - Read More -

22/1/2025 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has initiated legal proceedings against Dror Zvi Bauer, an Israeli soldier in the 614th Battalion, Engineering Corps, accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during the ongoing onslaught on Gaza since October 2023.
Legal complaints have been filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as with national authorities in Austria, Germany, and other European jurisdictions. These actions underscore the Foundation’s commitment to utilizing every available legal mechanism to ensure accountability for international crimes. - Read More -

18/1/2025 - Barcelona -- The Hind Rajab Foundation and the Palestinian Community in Catalonia have filed an urgent legal complaint against Sergeant Mori Keisar of the Israeli Defense Forces (Givati Brigade, 435 Battalion, Mitzvait Company, Retek Platoon). The complaint, filed under Spanish and international law, accuses Keisar of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the Israeli military operation in Gaza. The actions of Keisar and his platoon demonstrate systematic violations of international humanitarian law, targeting civilians and protected infrastructure. - Read More -

15/1/2025 - Thailand / The Hague - The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a formal complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Guy Azran, a soldier from the 432nd Battalion of Israel’s Givati Brigade, for war crimes committed during military operations in Gaza City, July 2024. These crimes are substantiated by video and photographic evidence documenting his actions, which constitute serious violations of international law. Azran is currently vacationing in Thailand. A request for his arrest have been submitted to Thai authorities. - Read More -

13/1/2025 - Major General Ghassan Alian (b. 1972), Head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), is currently in Rome, Italy. The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has filed cases with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Italian authorities, urging his immediate arrest for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Alian, who publicly referred to Palestinians in Gaza as "human animals," has no immunity from prosecution. Time is of the essence to ensure accountability for his actions. - Read More -

9/1/2025 - Stockholm, Sweden - The Hind Rajab Foundation has taken another significant step in its quest for justice by filing a legal complaint against Boaz Ben David, an Israeli sniper from the 932 Battalion of the Nahal Brigade. The complaint, filed with Swedish authorities, accuses Ben David of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possible acts of genocide during the recent military operations in Gaza. This move follows growing international calls to hold perpetrators of grave crimes accountable, ensuring justice for victims of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. - Read More -

6/1/2025 - Buenos Aires, Argentina - On January 2, 2025, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a legal case against Lieutenant Amit Nechmya, a platoon commander in the Latak Platoon of the Givati Brigade’s Rotem Battalion (435). Led by our lawyer Rodolfo Yanzón in Argentina, the case charges Nechmya with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. - Read More -

3/1/2025 - Brasilia, Brasil - In a historic legal development, Brazilian authorities have taken decisive action on a criminal complaint filed a week ago by the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) against an Israeli soldier currently in Brazil on tourism. The Federal Court of the Federal District, following the Federal Prosecutor’s agreement, has issued an urgent order for the police to investigate and take action against the suspect, marking a pivotal step toward accountability for crimes committed in Gaza. - Read More -

31/12/2024 - On December 31, 2023, Omri Nir, a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces' Combat Engineering Battalion 601, posted a photo on Instagram where he is seen posing inside a house in Gaza—a house that once belonged to a Palestinian family killed or displaced during Israel's genocide. The photo, a chilling display of impunity, was meant to be a personal trophy of sorts, showcasing his role in the Gaza genocide.
Fast forward to this year, as Omri Nir travels to Thailand to celebrate New Year’s Eve once again, the world looks very different for him. The Hind Rajab Foundation, committed to bringing perpetrators of war crimes to justice, has detected his presence in Thailand and acted decisively. - Read More -

26/12/2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has initiated legal actions in Argentina and Chile against Saar Hirshoren, a member of Israel's 749 Combat Engineering Battalion who is currently present there. Mr. Hirshoren is accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza, the HRF is demanding his immediate arrest. Simultaneously, a comprehensive complaint has been filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) targeting the entire battalion and its leadership for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. - Read More -

20/12/2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has formally filed a detailed complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli war criminal Lidor Kandalker, demanding his immediate arrest and prosecution. Kandalker, currently in Thailand, is a member of the Rovait Gaesh (Volcano Company), a combat engineering unit notorious for the systematic and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Key evidence submitted to the ICC includes a video in which Kandalker is seen counting down before detonating explosives that destroy a civilian home in Gaza. The footage captures him celebrating with his comrades afterward, boasting about the destruction. This shocking display underscores his direct involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In addition to filing the ICC complaint, the Hind Rajab Foundation has notified Thai authorities, including the police, the Ministry of Justice, and the Thai Embassy in The Hague. The foundation has urged them to apprehend Kandalker, prevent his escape, and fulfill their international obligations to ensure accountability for his crimes. - Read More -

17/12/2024 - Colombo, Sri Lanka - The Hind Rajab Foundation has located Gal Ferenbook, an Israeli soldier responsible for the death of a Palestinian civilian and the degrading treatment of their body, in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Foundation has formally demanded that Sri Lankan authorities arrest him immediately and cooperate with the International Criminal Court (ICC). A formal complaint has also been submitted to the ICC, and the case has been communicated to Interpol to issue an international Red Notice for his apprehension. - Read More -

6/12/2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation is filing an urgent legal complaint in France against Roi Hakimi, an Israeli soldier implicated in acts of torture and enforced disappearances during the recent Israeli assault on Gaza. Mr. Hakimi is currently on a tourism visit in France. - Read More -

3/12/2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation, in collaboration with the March 30 Movement, has taken a firm stance against the appointment of Colonel Moshe Tetro as Israel’s military attaché to Belgium. Citing his direct involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide during his tenure as the head of the Coordination and Liaison Administration for the Gaza Strip (CLA), the foundation is calling on the Belgian government to deny his accreditation. The Hind Rajab Foundation has also filed a detailed complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC), demanding immediate action against Tetro. - Read More -

29/11/2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation, in partnership with the March 30 Movement and through the office of attorney Haroon Raza, has filed a complaint demanding the immediate arrest and prosecution of three IDF soldiers who entered Amsterdam yesterday. The individuals involved are Yehuda Tsfa, Yotam Shmuelevich, and Liran Magal, members of the Latak Unit of the 932 “Granit” Battalion, accused of engaging in the destruction of civilian properties in Gaza without any military necessity. - Read More -

27/11/2024 - Rotterdam, 27 November 2024 – The Hind Rajab Foundation, in partnership with the March 30 Movement, has filed a formal complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli soldier Liam Shkedi. The complaint alleges Shkedi’s involvement in war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and crimes of aggression, calling for his immediate arrest and prosecution. - Read More -

18/11/2024 - Brussels, November 18, 2024 – The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) is actively investigating reports from journalistic sources of a possible detention in Cyprus related to Elisha Livman, an Israeli reserve officer accused of war crimes in Gaza. Despite this development, Livman managed to flee Cyprus with direct assistance from the Israeli state, according to the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom. This brazen intervention is a stark example of state-sponsored impunity, undermining international law and obstructing justice. - Read More -

14/11/2024 - Limassol, Cyprus, 14 November 2024 – The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) has lodged an urgent complaint with Cypriot authorities, calling for immediate action against Elisha Livman, a lieutenant in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), currently visiting Cyprus on a tourist visa. Livman, an officer in the T80 Infantry Unit, Sayeret Givati, have committed serious war crimes and exhibited genocidal intent in recent military operations in Gaza. - Read More -

Amsterdam, November 10, 2024 — The Amsterdam Police have officially opened an investigation into recent violent incidents involving Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters following a complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation and the March 30 Movement. These disturbing events, which unfolded in the city center, have sparked widespread concern across the Netherlands and internationally. - Read More -

Amsterdam, November 9, 2024 – The Hind Rajab Foundation, in partnership with the March 30 Movement, has taken an urgent legal step to combat rising instances of hate-fueled violence in Europe. Following disturbing incidents in Amsterdam, the two organizations have submitted a formal criminal complaint to the Amsterdam Public Prosecutor’s Office, seeking immediate action against supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv who have reportedly engaged in acts of incitement, violence, and vandalism. - Read More -

7/11/2024 - London, United Kingdom – November 6, 2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation has taken a significant step in the pursuit of international justice by submitting a formal request to the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) in the United Kingdom. The letter calls for a comprehensive investigation into alleged war crimes committed by Alon Elgali, Chief Executive Officer of Meshek Afar Limited, a company contracted by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Mr. Elgali is currently present in the United Kingdom, where he is alleged to be involved in actions that may constitute grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. - Read More -

24/10/2024 - Guayas, Ecuador – The Hind Rajab Foundation, in partnership with the March 30 Movement, has filed a ground-breaking legal complaint with the Ecuadorian authorities. The complaint targets Ecuadorian citizen Sahar Enrique Cohen for his involvement in war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Israeli military’s assaults on Gaza. The complaint, submitted to the Criminal Court of Guayas, seeks prosecution under Ecuadorian and international law for Cohen’s participation in systematic attacks on Palestinian civilians and medical facilities. - Read More -

8/10/2024 - The Hague – October 8, 2024 - The Hind Rajab Foundation, a branch of the March 30 Movement, has filed an unprecedented and historic complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against 1,000 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza, Palestine. These individuals, all of whom have been identified by name, are accused of participating in systematic attacks against civilians during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

This complaint, supported by over 8,000 pieces of verifiable evidence—including videos, audio recordings, forensic reports, and social media documentation—demonstrates the soldiers' direct involvement in these atrocities. All of the named soldiers were located in Gaza during the genocidal assault, and the evidence reveals their participation in violations of international law. - Read More -

6/8/2024 - The March 30 Movement, represented by lawyer Haroon Raza, has officially filed a complaint with the Dutch judicial authorities against Dutch citizen and IDF soldier Liam V. A. The complaint accuses Liam V. A. of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza. - Read More -

3/7/2024 - The Hague, July 3, 2024 - This morning, the March 30 Movement, represented by attorney Haroon Raza, officially submitted a comprehensive complaint to the ICC against Benny Gantz (b. 1959), Ron Dermer (b. 1971), Gabi Eisenkot (b. 1960), and Aryeh Deri (b. 1959), all members of Israel's now dissolved War Cabinet. In addition to Netanyahu and Gallant, these individuals cannot be allowed to escape responsibility through resignation. - Read More -

16/6/2024 - The March 30 Movement, represented by Mr. Haroon Raza, has filed a formal complaint and is calling for the immediate arrest and prosecution of representatives of COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. This urgent action follows multiple documented instances where COGAT has been implicated in severe violations of international law, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war against the civilians of Gaza. Under the directive of Israeli officials such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (b. 1958), COGAT's actions have resulted in widespread suffering and death among the Palestinian population. - Read More -

4/5/2024 - The Hague - Advocaten voor de Vrede and the March 30 Movement, have lodged a comprehensive complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) targeting Israel's actions in Gaza. This submission, deemed the most robust and detailed to date, aims to hold Israeli authorities accountable for alleged crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. - Read More -

19/4/2024 - A team of lawyers led by Gilles Devers has filed a complaint with the national anti-terrorist prosecutor's office for torture and war crimes in connection with the military attack on Gaza. This complaint "against X" is intended to determine the role played by Yoel Ohnona, the Franco-Israeli soldier whose testimony has been requested.
In a video that has gone viral, this soldier praised the violence and abuse inflicted on a Palestinian detainee, who can be seen, along with other detainees, in a distressed situation, shackled and blindfolded.
The outcry provoked by the broadcast of this video led the Quai d'Orsay to reaffirm the "competence of French justice to deal with crimes committed by French nationals abroad, including in the ongoing conflict in Gaza".
This video, and the many reports of torture of Palestinian detainees, have prompted widespread condemnation and demands from civil society that the perpetrators of flagrant human rights violations be held to account.
It is to satisfy this demand for justice and prevent further atrocities that this first complaint in France has been filed. - Read More -

30/3/2024 - THE HAGUE, MARCH 30 2024 – The March 30 Movement, represented by attorney Haroon Raza, filed a detailed complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Dutch-Israeli illegal settler Akiva van Koningsveld, and other Israeli settlers. This action accuses them squarely of participating in or being complicit in land theft, colonization, acts of genocide, alongside their ongoing involvement in a broad spectrum of war crimes and crimes against humanity within the Occupied Palestinian Territories. - Read More -

22/3/2024 - Lawyers of the #March30Movement filed a complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC) demanding to initiate an urgent investigation and issue an arrest warrant for Yoel Ohnona (The French-Israeli soldier speaking in the torture video). - Read More -

7/3/2024 - Next week, President Isaac Herzog (b. 1960) of Israel is expected to visit The Netherlands, a visit that comes under the heavy shadow of the ongoing Gaza genocide. Mr. Haroon Raza, representing the #March30Movement, has lodged a detailed complaint highlighting President Herzog’s pivotal role in fostering a climate conducive to genocide in Gaza. The accusations stem from President Herzog's direct and indirect contributions to systematic atrocities against the Palestinian population, effectively breaching international humanitarian and criminal laws. - Read More -

16/2/2024 - The Hague - The March 30 Movement via attorney Mr. Haroon Raza has lodged a new formal complaint against Dutch citizen and IDF soldier Leah Rachmani, accusing her of involvement in grave violations during military operations in Gaza.
This complaint, presented to Dutch authorities, meticulously outlines allegations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and potential genocide, underscoring the critical need for accountability and adherence to international law.
Drawing upon detailed documentation and legal standards, the complaint seeks an investigation and subsequent prosecution, highlighting the alleged actions resulting in civilian casualties, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and violations of the Geneva Conventions. This legal action is a call to the international community and Dutch authorities to uphold the principles of human rights and equality under the law, including the consideration of passport revocation measures. - Read More -

13/2/2024 - Amsterdam - Our research team have detected the presence of IDF soldier Meir Ben Hamou within Amsterdam today. Ben Hamou is actively taking part in the onslaught on Gaza.
Our legal division, through attorney Haroon Raza, has formally requested his immediate detention. This request is based on allegations of Mr. Ben Hamou's involvement in actions constituting violations of international and Dutch law, specifically pertaining to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
We call upon Dutch authorities to act with urgency in response to this matter, reinforcing the principles of justice and accountability. - Read More -

27/1/2024 - The March 30 Movement, represented by attorney Haroon Raza, has initiated a legal action against IDF members involved in the genocide in Gaza. These members, identified as Major Noy Leon, General-Major David Negesh, Major Amit Deri, and Reserve Captain Meir Rapoport, are currently in the Netherlands for an ICJ protest. They are scheduled to depart for Tel Aviv tomorrow, intending to return to Gaza. In the picture above, one of them, Captain Meir Rapoport is seen boasting on a Gazan destroyed house while writing the genocidal call " We will erase the memory of Amalek from under the heavens...". The March 30 Movement is urgently requesting the Dutch authorities to intervene, preventing their departure, and by doing that preventing the committing of more crimes and ensuring they are held responsible for their actions. - Read More -

30/12/2023 - The legal team of the #March30Movements has intensified its efforts to address serious allegations of international law and human rights violations. Following our initial complaint against Jonathan Ben Hamou, we have now extended our legal actions to include four other IDF soldiers of Dutch nationality. - Read More -

26/12/2023 - The March 30 Movement, represented by attorney Mr. Haroon Raza, has officially filed a complaint in the Netherlands, actively seeking accountability for the atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Gaza. This complaint targets Jonathan Ben Hamou, a Dutch-Israeli citizen who participated in the ongoing genocidal actions of the IDF in Gaza. - Read More -

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-O Auto 35mm f2 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 27°C)

- Here's the fucking mentally challenged and seriously retarded current US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth (b. 1980) actually touring Israeli occupied Hebron together with insane jewish religious zionist fundamentalist extremists and racist, fascist kahanist settlers in November 2024:

Yishai Fleisher: Trumps New Pick, Pete Hegseth, Could CHANGE Israel Forever (Publ. 18 Nov. 2024)

See also:

The Grayzone: Pete Hegseth gets new anti-Islam tattoo (Publ. 1 April 2025)


BOYCOTT ISRAEL - BOYCOTT USA

Some Suggestions:

- Visa
- Mastercard
- American Express
- PayPal
- Amazon
- eBay
- Tesla
- Ford Motor Company
- Stellantis (Dodge, Chrysler, Fiat (!!), Opel (!!), Citroën (!!), Peugeot (!!), Alfa Romeo (!!) )
- General Motors Company (Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick, GMC)
- X (Twitter)
- OpenAI
- ChatGPT
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Google
- Android
- Gmail
- Youtube
- Tinder
- Hinge
- Happn
- Airbnb
- Disney
- Netflix
- DHL
- UPS
- US American films and series
- US American music and artists
- US American WINE
- Apple (including App Store, iTunes, Apple TV)
- Microsoft
- McDonald’s
- Circle K
- Esso
- ExxonMobil
- Texaco
- 7-Eleven
- Burger King
- Coca-Cola
- Pepsi
- Starbucks
- Mondelez
- Freia sjokolade
- Friele kaffe
- Gevalia kaffe
- Coop kaffe
- SodaStream
- Marabou
- Kraft Heinz
- O’Boy
- Maarud
- HP Sauce
- Procter & Gamble
- Always tampons
- Always vaginal wipes
- Always ultra
- Pampers diapers
- Braun
- Gillette
- Ariel detergents
- Head & Shoulders shampoo
- Pantene shampoos
- Oral-B
- Yes detergents
- Vicks
- Wella
- Oreo
- Duracell batteries
- Energizer batteries
- L'Oréal
- Maybelline
- Johnson & Johnson
- Zyrtec
. Imodium
. Nicorette
- Listerine
- Saint Laurent (Polo)
- Ray-Ban
- Oakley
- Tommy Hilfiger
- Tom Ford
- Maui Jim

Kamera: Leica IIIc (1946) IIIf upgraded
Linse: Leica Summar 50mm f/2 (1937)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Unit 8200

Re-Publishing...

REVEALED: THE ISRAELI SPIES WRITING AMERICA’S NEWS

by Alan Macleod
MPN.news, October 16, 2024

"One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak." So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military "successes," its author Barak Ravid (b. 1980) notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh (1962-2024) and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024), and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are "not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach 'de-escalation through escalation.'" Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel's largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country's actions.

White House Insider

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents' Award "for overall excellence in White House coverage"—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his "deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad" and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled "Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages," and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how "frustrated" Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.

Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account.

It was a moving and special night that I never imagined even in my wildest dreams. It wouldn't have been possible without my editors at @axios who made my stories better, my sources who trusted me, my family that came with me to Washington, and you, the readers. Thank you
Flickr: Explore!
— Barak Ravid (@BarakRavid) April 28, 2024

Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that "President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn't change course in Gaza, 'we won't be able to support you,'" and that he was "making his strongest push for an end to the fighting in Gaza in six months of war, and warning for the first time that U.S. policy on the war will depend on Israel's adherence to his demands," which included "an immediate ceasefire." In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for "a diplomatic solution" – another highly dubious claim.

Other articles by Ravid following the same pattern include:

- Scoop: Biden tells Bibi he's not in it for a year of war in Gaza
- Scoop: White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video
- Biden "running out" of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days
- Biden-Bibi clash escalates as U.S. accused of undermining Israeli government
- Biden and Bibi "red lines" for Rafah put them on a collision course
- Biden on hot mic: Told Bibi we needed "come to Jesus" meeting on Gaza
- Scoop: White House loses trust in Israeli government as Middle East spirals
- Israeli minister lambasted at White House about Gaza and war strategy
- Scoop: Biden told Bibi U.S. won't support an Israeli counterattack on Iran

This relentless whitewashing of the Biden administration has drawn widespread mockery online.

"AXIOS EXCLUSIVE: After selling Netanyahu millions of dollars worth of weapons, Biden played —loudly — Taylor Swift's 'Bad Blood.' 'Everyone could hear it,' a source close to Biden says," tweeted X user David Grossman. "Continuing to hand over big piles of cash and weapons, but shaking my head so everyone knows i sort of disagree with it," quipped comedian Hussein Kesvani, in response to Ravid's latest article suggesting that Biden has become "increasingly distrustful" of the Israeli government.

Throughout this supposed split between the U.S. and Israel, the Biden administration has continued to voice enthusiastic support for Israeli offensives, block ceasefire resolutions and Palestinian statehood at the U.N., and has sent $18 billion worth of weapons to Israel in the past 12 months. Thus, no matter how questionable these Axios reports are, they serve a vital role for Washington, allowing the Biden administration to distance itself from what international bodies have labeled a genocide. Ravid's function has been to manufacture consent for the government among elite liberal audiences who read Axios, allowing them to continue to believe that the U.S. is an honest broker for peace in West Asia rather than a key enabler of Israel.

Ravid does not hide his open disdain for Palestinians. In September, he retweeted a post that stated:

”That’s the PaliNazi way…they pocket concessions without giving anything in return and then use those concessions as the baseline for the next round of negotiations. PaliNazis don’t know how to tell the truth.”

Less than one week later, he promoted Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant's highly dubious claim that Israeli Defense Forces had found a picture of the children al-Qassam Brigades leader Mohammed Sinwar celebrating in front of a huge picture of planes hitting the World Trade Center. Gallant stated that they had found this picture – clearly trying to falsely associate Palestinians with 9/11 – in a tunnel "where the Sinwar brothers were hiding like rats."

this is amazing. Barak Ravid, who is considered by the Western media class to be the greatest most objective neutral "journalist" on the ongoing Gaza genocide even though he served in Israeli military intelligence and constantly launders Israeli propaganda, is now openly…
Flickr: Explore!
— ☀️ (@zei_squirrel) September 6, 2024


An Infamous Spy Agency

Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military's largest and most controversial division.

Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world's attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta (b. 1938).

Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.

- Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

Described as Israel's Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel's burgeoning hi-tech sector.

It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel's futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.

Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative Flickr: Explore! that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for "gay" so that he could listen out for them in conversations.

Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world's most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France's Emmanuel Macron, South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan's Imran Khan.

The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (1958-2018) before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.

- Exposed: How Israeli Spies Control Your VPN

In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.

This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental "part" of Israel. "If the problem is really the occupation," he said, "then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin."

Leaving aside Ravid's comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet's most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans' news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia's F.S.B.?

News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel

Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour's shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.

Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN's notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America's understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel's bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

CNN's penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day. Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously Flickr: Explore! as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.

The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Flickr: Explore!, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.

Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks (b. 1961), have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi (b. 1939) in 1948.

MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (b. 1965) (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF, he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.

- Revealed: The Former Israeli Spies Working in Top Jobs at Google, Facebook and Microsoft


Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor (b. 1966), who sits on Meta's oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta's other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress. Meta has been formally condemned for its systematic suppression of Palestinian voices across its platforms by Human Rights Watch, which documented over 1,000 instances of overt anti-Palestinian censorship in October and November 2023 alone. A measure of this bias is highlighted by the fact that, at one point, Instagram automatically inserted the word "terrorist" into the profiles of users who called themselves Palestinian.

Despite the widespread claims by U.S. politicians that it is a hotbed of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic racism, TikTok also employs many former Unit 8200 agents in key positions in its organization. For example, in 2021, it hired Asaf Hochman as its global head of product strategy and operations. Before joining TikTok, Hochman spent over five years as an Israeli spook. He now works for Meta.

Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship

When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly Flickr: Explore! of the paper's coverage found that words like "slaughter," "massacre," and "horrific" appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.

Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline "Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives" – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.

This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top. A leaked New York Times Flickr: Explore! from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as "genocide," "slaughter," and "ethnic cleansing" when discussing Israel's actions. Times' staff must refrain from using words like "refugee camp," "occupied territory," or even "Palestine" in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.

CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson (b. 1957) sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker "Hamas-controlled" when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas' viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was "not newsworthy" and amounted to "inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda."

Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. In November, the Times' Jazmine Hughes (b. 1991) was forced out after she signed an open letter opposing genocide in Palestine. The newspaper terminated Hosam Salem's contract the previous year after a pressure campaign from pro-Israel group Honest Reporting. And CNN anchor Marc Lamont Hill (b. 1978) was abruptly fired in 2018 for calling for Palestinian liberation in a speech at the United Nations.

Large organizations like Axios, CNN and the New York Times obviously know who they are hiring. These are some of the most sought-after jobs in journalism, and hundreds of applicants are likely applying for each position. The fact that these organizations choose to select Israeli spies above everybody else raises serious questions about their journalistic credibility and their purpose.

Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country's ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?

Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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Yishai Fleisher: Trump GOES FULL Pro-Israel on First Day! (Publ. 21 Jan. 2025)

- Here’s someone who really LOVES the new US President - the religious zionists and extremist settlers of Israel!

Have a listen to Yishai Fleisher (b. 1976), the spokesman for the jewish extremist settlements in Hebron in the illegally occupied Palestinian West Bank. Now, 'rabbi' Fleisher doesn't actually live in Hebron himself; he lives in the illegal settlement of Efrat - that's where you will also find Bentzi Gopstein (b. 1969), the american-born director of the jewish racist anti-assimilation organization Lehava.

So, these extremist settlements in Hebron that Yishai Fleisher represents have their headquarters in Kiryat Arba; a 'residential' settlement which used to be the second home outside of Jerusalem for american-born mad ‘rabbi’ Meir Kahane (1932-1990) - founder of the fascist, racist, religious extremist Kach party (1971-1994) in Israel.

Kiryat Arba was also the home of american-born kahanist and mass-murderer Baruch Goldstein (1956-1994) who, dressed in his IDF army fatigues, perpetrated the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre right on the day of jewish genocidal 'holiday' of Purim during Ramadan - opening fire on 800 muslim worshipers inside the mosque; killing 29 and wounding 125 in 1994.

In addition, Kiryat Arba was home to the seriously mentally insane and violent Gush Emunim leader, religious fanatic and (in his younger days) Tobias Fünke lookalike Moshe Levinger (1932-2015).

Moshe Levinger’s personal assistant in Hebron was the hateful nutcase Anat Cohen; she is the daughter of Moshe Zar (b. 1938) - a close friend of war criminal Ariel Sharon (1928-2014) and a convicted terrorist from the Gush Emunim terror cell known as the Jewish Underground.

[Note: The present-day successor to the Gush Emunim is called Nahala and was founded in 2005 by evil grandmother Daniella Weiss (b. 1945) together with 'rabbi' Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) before he died. You can see her own presentation of the Nahala settler movement from 2015 on YouTube]

[PS: Nahala is a better spelling of this movement's name as opposed to the english Wikipedia 'Nachala' spelling since both the movement and their name is obviously closely related both in actions and in etymology to Israel's 'special' Nahal paramilitary settler programs and IDF war criminal military settler units since 1948.]

Digressions aside.. let's continue:

Avraham Avinu, a small settlement right inside Hebron city center itself and thus obviously closely linked to Kiryat Arba is where you will find the home of Israel’s pretty sick and mentally deranged jewish fundamentalist Minister of Settlements and National Missions (!!!) Orit Strook (b. 1960) from the Religious Zionist Party; a party headed by extremist settler and Israeli 'Finance' minister Bezalel Smotrich (b. 1980). Be not fooled by her meek appearance - Orit Strook (b. 1960) is a seasoned ardent far-right religious fundamentalist settler activist ever since the days of the illegal Israeli Yamit settlement just south of the Gaza Strip inside Egypt, a settlement vehemently and reluctantly abandoned by the fascist Zionists and religious fundamentalist mormon-like 'jews' in 1982 as part of the Camp David Accords (1978).

Tel Rumeida, another small illegal settlement linked to Kiryat Arba right inside Hebron itself; that is where you will find the residence of vile american-born extremist Baruch Marzel (b. 1959) - he was Meir Kahane’s right-hand man and is the primus motor and founder of several of the many, many Israeli successor parties to Kahane's banned and internationally outlawed jewish terrorist Kach party.

And finally, this tiny little jewish terrorist village of Kiryat Arba (pop. 7,500 as per January 2025) is also where you will find the residence of another Israeli minister - Itamar Ben-Gvir (b. 1976), infamous leader of the kahanist Jewish Power party and, until a few days ago, the jewish equivalent to Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) and Minister of National Security in Israel.

- Oh… and while we're at it... have you ever heard about the US AMERICAN 501(c)(3) tax-deductible Hebron Fund which actually FINANCES these depraved religious fascist terrorist crazies?

No wonder Yishai Fleisher is happy - the money flows ever so strong from ordinary citizens of the United States of America.

Just think about it.

In the USA, funding genocide and ethnic cleansing is perfectly fine and tax-deductible.

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ZIONISM IS FASCISM!


Ur-Fascism (1995) - by Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets. It was good exercise.

In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch, and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said: “Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are. Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items, but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.

A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic books were brightly colored and smelled good.

One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American liberators was thus — after so many palefaces in black shirts — that of a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne …” Unfortunately there was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.

In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust, thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what we were liberated from.

In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.

In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights — the windows closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone luminous halo — listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.

In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed, refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.

But who are They?

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR, “The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists” — meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists… . Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the modern rationalism of Gropius.

There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles as “Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech” or “States of Mind Created by Fascism.”) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.

The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism — which were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle decadence.

Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great respect.

Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.

During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower. The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did not pay attention to such arcane language.

All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what became the Holocaust).

The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:

1. abc
2. bcd
3. cde
4. def

Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one. However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one.

Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages — in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, “the combination of different forms of belief or practice”; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.

One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old “proletarians” are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the U.S., a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people of the world, the members of the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler. Since the group is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view — one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.

Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against “rotten” parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples” — “maniples” being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed by five or six political parties — among them the Democrazia Cristiana, the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the Liberal Party.

Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed for some time as clandestine organizations.

The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,” — I now read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western man by virtue of these new words.

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling:

I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

Freedom and liberation are an unending task. Let me finish with a poem by Franco Fortini:

Sulla spalletta del ponte
Le teste degli impiccati
Nell’acqua della fonte
La bava degli impiccati.
Sul lastrico del mercato
Le unghie dei fucilati
Sull’erba secca del prato
I denti dei fucilati.
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
La nostra carne non è più d’uomini
Mordere l’aria mordere i sassi
Il nostro cuore non è più d’uomini.
Ma noi s’è letto negli occhi dei morti
E sulla terra faremo libertà
Ma l’hanno stretta i pugni dei morti
La giustizia che si farà.

(On the bridge’s parapet
The heads of the hanged
In the flowing rivulet
The spittle of the hanged.
On the cobbles in the market-places
The fingernails of those lined up and shot
On the dry grass in the open spaces
The broken teeth of those lined up and shot.
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our flesh is no longer human
Biting the air, biting the stones
Our hearts are no longer human.
But we have read into the eyes of the dead
And shall bring freedom on the earth
But clenched tight in the fists of the dead
Lies the justice to be served.)

— poem translated by Stephen Sartarelli

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 35mm f2.8 (1974)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400 -1EV
Kjemi: Xtol (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Monday 30 December 2024: My New Year resolutions for 2025:

1. Do not buy or use any goods or services coming from Israel or their Occupied Palestinian Territories. Boycott Israel - the most racist, fascist, immoral and genocidal apartheid country in the world.

For me, this is a simple operation and will only involve my total boycott of the Israeli online genealogy platforms MyHeritage and Geni. I have no interest in any other consumer product coming out of Israel. But many of you may have heard of Ahava Dead Sea products coming from the Occupied Territories. Don’t buy it, don’t use it.

2. Do not buy or use any American goods or services as far as it is humanly possible today. They only use their income for WAR. The only way to stop this MADNESS is to stop buying and using their goods and services. Money to the USA is money to Israel.

This task is not as simple as boycotting only Israeli goods and products, but I will do my best - just like the USA has done it’s best in supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, providing Israel with weapons and incredible amounts of money, abusing their powers in the UN Security Council, working against international law and justice, supporting apartheid and never ever actually supporting or working to establish a Free Sovereign Palestine.

Israel seems to have become a way for all the corrupt American politicians in their archaic 'democratic' system to get an extra income under the table, directly stealing from the people, and for the American War Industries to thrive and grow; it is a Perpetuum mobile where US politicians donate money to Israel and where Israel in return use those money given to buy off US politicians [tax-deductible] and buying their weapons to slaughter Palestinians.

Americans get their money back [but first, some commercials] [without paying taxes] [under the table] and the Israelis get their fascist religious extremist zionist dreams come true. Incidentally, Israel's bizarre dreams of grandeur are closely linked to the American voters' archaic dreams of extremist christian zionist Eschatology. These people all belong in the Bronze Age.

USA has for so many years since the end of the Cold War been endangering all of Europe’s security by abusing the NATO alliance (this abuse started back in 1999 with the bombing of Yugoslavia!) presiding over a European proxy war with Russia via Ukraine - a war that now even involves North Korea (WTF!) and has killed hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe and flooded Western Europe with refugees once again! It needs to stop, and our own nations and politicians who are hostages to the American gangster regime can do no other - so therefore I can no longer justify MY feeble hard-earned money feeding this warmongering genocidal nation. It has to stop, and the only way I can make a miniscule difference is by boycotting American goods and services.

- First on my list: Mark Zuckerberg (1984) and his his Facebook and all of Facebook's subsidiaries through Meta. Easy. Done. Nothing!

- Second on my list: Larry Page (b. 1973) and Sergey Brin’s (b. 1973) Google and Alphabet Inc. - this is not so easy. This company with their search engine, Gmail and their subsidiary companies like YouTube and Android have infested the whole world. Instead of Google's search engine I have been using DuckDuckGo for years - but this is also an American company so my search will go on for something more safe and European.

As for Gmail, I am using Swiss Proton Mail instead but I have yet to to make the cut final. I hope I will be able to do so during the course of 2025.

As for YouTube, I have no clear alternative right now that is not American.

Android is easy - I never used it. But instead of Android I use Apple - which I feel is safer - but here is the problem - it is an American company. Maybe the solution is to go full-on dumbphone and get a Swiss Punkt. I might in fact do that.

What do you really need an American ‘smartphone’ for anyways? Life is analogue.

More American companies and platforms to boycott:

- Amazon Inc. - I can get most of my (paper) books and other stuff I usually buy on Amazon locally anyways. Amazon is a convenient marketplace, that's true - but it’s American and I’d rather suffer a little inconvenience just to not let the Americans get my money.

- eBay - again, such a great platform and marketplace for (in my case) photographic camera equipment and whatnot - but then again - if I could buy directly from Japanese camera stores with ease and no American involvement I would do so in a heartbeat without using American eBay. Let’s hope the Japanese evolve their international trade in this regard.

As for FILM there's plenty of European film providers; hey, we were first with film and photography anyways and have long traditions still thriving and living here. But I do love Kodak 5222. This is a problem - but at least I only use European chemicals these days. Foma and Tetenal.

- PayPal - also a very convenient platform to use, but goddamned this is the brainchild of Elon Musk (b. 1971) and I’ll do my very best to never support that fascist bastard. You’ll never see me driving an American car either, and certainly not a Tesla. Most unethical car ever.

- Airbnb - an American company that makes it easy to rent a room or a house for anyone in all those illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories - it's just as sick as if American tourists through a 'tourist agency' could come and live in Nazi german confiscated Norwegian flats, houses and cottages to relax or just 'experience' Nazi occupied Norway in 1941. This is exactly what Airbnb is making possible in the Occupied Palestinian Territories these days - and I shall never, ever use Airbnb.

OK, that’s a lot but we’re not finished yet.

- Disney - Easy. They destroyed Star Wars. Done!

- Pepsi and Coca-Cola - Done. Never again. There are many other local alternatives. Easy!

- McDonald’s and Burger King - Done. Easy. Probably the worst hamburgers in the world anyways.

So when it comes to consumer products that you get in the general store, there are two really big and awful companies that I will do my best to never buy their products ever again. These two companies are the American-owned Mondelez International and the Swiss company Nestlé together with all their subsidiaries and brands.

Things not to buy (applicable to me):

- Douwe Egberts coffee (Mondelez)
- Toblerone chocolate (Mondelez)
- Heinz products (Mondelez)

- L’Oréal and ALL their subsidiary products Garnier, Maybelline, Biotherm, Lancôme, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, Kérastase, Guy Laroche, Redken (Nestlé)

- Nespresso (Nestlé)
- Nescafé (Nestlé)
- Nesquik (Nestlé)
- Nestea (Nestlé)

- Smarties chocolates (Nestlé)
- After Eight chocolate (Nestlé)
- Maggi products (Nestlé)
- Purina dogfood (Nestlé)

[and Friskies catfood for those of you with cats - also Nestlé]

- Freia chocolate products (Mondelez) [The chocolate that could never ever ever be sold to Sweden otherwise we would lose our independence AGAIN - but which could easily be sold to America instead. Remember all those Edvard Grieg Freia commercials?]

- Friele coffee (Mondelez) in Bergen which also produce ALL the norwegian COOP cooffee products and ALL the swedish Gevalia coffee brand products

- Marabou candy and ALL their chocolate products (Mondelez)

Allright, so already quite an extensive list and that’s not half of it.

Therefore at the end, I want to inform you all about the Boycat app - the Ethical Shopping and Boycott Companion. Use it.

And if you have more suggestions of Israeli and American companies, products and services to boycott, do let me know. I’m eager ears.

PS: I am fully aware that Flickr is American. There are many good things coming out of America. I hope in 2025 USA can change their ways.

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

I thought cutting off the branch you are sitting on was a recognized sign of complete ignorance

I thought unfettered growth forever was a total mathematical impossibility

I didn't think we could continue to enrich ourselves at the expense of everyone else's lives and needs

I didn't think morality and ethics could be chosen out.

Until you said: "Yes - We can do that"

You said: "Yes - It'll be fine"

I didn't think the capacity for shameless denial was quite as strong as it clearly is in our species

I didn't think we could continue to live carefree as if nothing was wrong

I didn't think we could turn a blind eye to all the injustices in the world that doesn’t affect us all

I didn't think we could fail to do anything about it.

Until you said: "Yes - We can do that"

You said: "Yes - It's probably going to be okay"

You said: "Yes - We can do it"

You said: "Yes"

And then I was happy

And I danced
And I screamed
And I cheered loudly

And I hummed:
Nanananananana

I didn't think I had any role in society besides being an irresponsible clown or a fool

I didn't think anyone was so thick-headed that they would look to me for political answers

I didn't think someone like me was needed to point out something that we all can understand

I didn't think I could make a difference.

Until you said: "Yes - We can do that"

You said: "Yes - It'll be fine"

You said: "Yes - We can do it"

You said: "Yes"

And then I was happy

You said: "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes"

That was what you said.

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Citations Needed: Ep. 214 - Fake Ceasefire Talks and Feigned 'Concern': How US Media Helped Distance Biden From the Gaza Genocide (Dec 11, 2024) [Podcast]

"White House frustrated by Israel's onslaught but sees few options," reports the Washington Post. "White House cancels meeting, scolds Netanyahu in protest over video," announces Axios. "Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East," asserts The New York Times.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, we've heard seemingly endlessly that the Biden White House disagrees with the violence in Gaza, but can't do anything to stop it. A number of hindrances frustrate the administration, we're told. There are limits to the United States’ influence and power. President Biden is furious and anguished at Israeli leadership. The administration is working around the clock toward a ceasefire, which — we are repeatedly told — will come any day now.

But, as everyone from the Brookings Institution to the Financial Times to Israeli officials and generals themselves make clear: Biden has been able to, and still can, end Israel's genocidal onslaught whenever he wants. The US has dispositive leverage over Israel, leverage Biden has repeatedly––and openly––ruled out using.

The stark reality is that Biden simply doesn't want to stop Israel and, while he may have complaints about the excesses and PR around the margins, he largely agrees with the outlines of Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

To obscure this central fact, US media has now spent over a year pushing out three White House and Israeli-curated media genres of hand-wringing deflection: (1) Helpless Biden, (2) Fuming/Deeply Concerned Biden, and (3) Third Partying.

On this episode, as Biden is set to step down next month, we will go over the media's legacy of covering for the President for 15 months, examine these fictitious reporting genres designed to distance him from the carnage in Gaza, and look at how they worked tirelessly to minimize responsibility and absolve US officials from their involvement in a genocide being live-streamed for over a year.

Our guest is journalist Dalia Hatuqa.

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

December 5, 2024

Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza

Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today.

The report, 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.

“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard (b. 1965), Secretary General of Amnesty International. 

“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.”

“States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.”

Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.

“Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza,” said Agnès Callamard. 

“Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co-exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel’s sole intent.”

Amnesty International examined Israel’s acts in Gaza closely and in their totality, taking into account their recurrence and simultaneous occurrence, and both their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences. The organization considered the scale and severity of the casualties and destruction over time. It also analysed public statements by officials, finding that prohibited acts were often announced or called for in the first place by high-level officials in charge of the war efforts.

“Taking into account  the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel’s intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, whether in parallel with, or as a means to achieve, its military goal of destroying Hamas,” said Agnès Callamard.

“The atrocity crimes committed on 7 October 2023 by Hamas and other armed groups against Israelis and victims of other nationalities, including deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking, can never justify Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”

International jurisprudence recognizes that the perpetrator does not need to succeed in their attempts to destroy the protected group, either in whole or in part, for genocide to have been committed. The commission of prohibited acts with the intent to destroy the group, as such, is sufficient.

Amnesty International’s report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication.

Unprecedented scale and magnitude

Israel’s actions following Hamas’s deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable.

Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions:

“Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”

Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment.

Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel’s military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion.

Intent to destroy

To establish Israel’s specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel’s system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57-year-old military occupation of the Palestinian territory.

Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel’s claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas’s actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel’s extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.

In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent.

"Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now."
- Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International

However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent.

Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them.

Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to “erase” Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities.

Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm

Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective.

In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping.

While these represent just a fraction of Israel’s aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population.

Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction

The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other’s devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass “evacuation” orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza’s population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza.

After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza’s homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health.

"The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience."
- Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International

Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse.

Through its repeated “evacuation” orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians – 90% of Gaza’s population – into ever-shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza’s residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.

Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate.

They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to.

Accountability for genocide

“The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience,” said Agnès Callamard.

“Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel’s allies.

“The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (b. 1958) for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long-overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court’s decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC.

“We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished.”

Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account.

The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law.

Background

On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report.

Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in-depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians,  as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire.


For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here.


Source: Amnesty International - Amnesty concludes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza (Publ. 5 December 2024)

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Chris Hedges: To Kill A People (publ. 23 November 2024)

TRANSCRIPT

Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei (b. 1939) and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken (b. 1962), raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk (b. 1973), Amos Hochstein (b. 1973), who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan (b. 1976) — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.

But this is a lesson that is never learned.

How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s (1957-2011) attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.

By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.

Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.

All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024). It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (1947-2004), one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir (1935-1988), known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), who I also knew. But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar's place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over.

Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestinians in Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.

Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.

Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.

But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.

Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.

This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.

Israeli journalist Yinon Magal (b. 1969) on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz (b. 1975) asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.

We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.

We cannot plead ignorance.

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.

The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.

This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.

The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.

“After the war,” Nick Turse (b. 1975) writes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.

Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.

The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.

We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.

Industrial slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cynically, calls “mowing the lawn.”

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.

Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.

The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to be killed. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.

Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.”

Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.

At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.

“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”

In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.

Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 12.6 percent of a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.”

Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.

Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.

Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building - including mosques, hospitals and schools - protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.

These accusations, Francesca Albanese (b. 1977), the U.N. Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”

“In August,” Albanese writes in her most recent report, “entry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”

“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”

These measures, she notes, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”

The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 Thomas Friedman (b. 1953) telling Charlie Rose (b. 1942) on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this” ? That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.

As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.

The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank.

Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure.

Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.

“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent, nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.”

Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas” or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are “camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari (b. 1947) from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”

Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a ‘Greater Israel.’”

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.

There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh (1962-2024), that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.

The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump (b. 1946). Kamala Harris (b. 1964) has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden (b. 1942). There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.

In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.

Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.

The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi (1919-1987) stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.

“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Václav Havel (1936-2011) writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”

What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?

What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?

What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?

What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?

What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?

What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?

What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?

Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?

If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s conscience.

A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.

“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”

I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.

“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus (c. AD 56 - c. 120) wrote of those the emperor Nero (AD 37 - AD 68) singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”

Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.

We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.

But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?

Who were Nero’s guests?

We are Nero’s guests.

History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.

“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”

The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.

Source: The Chris Hedges Report: Chris Hedges at UCSB: To Kill a People (publ. 23 November 2024) [substack]

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Friday 22 November 2024: Today I will share with you Matthew Hoh’s haunting surrealistic eye-witness account beholding the Gaza genocide from a safe distance inside Israel together with Israeli schoolchildren.

Matthew Hoh is a disabled former US soldier worth listening to and a member of the Veterans for Peace organization. The following text below was published on Matthew Hoh’s substack called 'Matt's Thoughts on War and Peace' on monday 18 November 2024.

The very next day, he was further extensively interviewed by american judge Andrew Napolitano (b. 1950) about what he saw. You can see that interview with far more details in full here:


Judge Napolitano: Matt Hoh - Live from Israel (Published 19 November 2024)


Stare into Gaza

by Matthew Hoh

That is Gaza behind me.

The fence line is 600m away. The northern part of Gaza, where Israel is carrying out a genocide within a genocide, systematically starving 300,000 Palestinians to death, is about 2km further.

The absurdity and the obscenity of being able to be this close to 20,000 murdered children, their bodies “prophetic voices from under the rubble” as a colleague called them, is difficult to accept.

The grotesque horror of a school field trip arriving at this location from two hours away to watch the mass slaughter from an observation deck was a shock I am overwhelmed by. The first wave of boys pumped celebratory fists and thrust middle fingers upon their sight of Gaza.

There were no warplanes or drones visible. The school kids and other audience members of a genocide who gawked and put money into a telescope left disappointed as they saw no bombs or missiles, no artillery or tank fire. There were no blast waves from controlled demolitions to wash over them, and the numbers of smoke pillars from smoldering and cratered homes and schools were in the single digits, their fires not vigorous enough to be smelled. It must have been underwhelming and a let down; not much to boast about or revel in on the school bus ride home.

It was quiet. The sounds of those buried under rubble don’t reach the observation deck. No torn and wrecked bodies could be seen, no sunlight reflected in pools of blood, and no strips of clothes snagged on exposed bones fluttered in the strong wind. We were as close as we could be but so separate and so safe from it. It was sanitary and septic, picturesque.

I felt I was a voyeur, a tourist, a spectator. I felt disgust and disbelief. And I felt an absence within me that I cannot articulate.

To be that close to the cleansing and destruction of 2.2 million people and to be centering now my words on my feelings doesn’t escape me. Perhaps a well-achieved purpose of that observation deck of genocide.

The Nietzsche-ism, stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you, struck me as I stood there.

Stare into Gaza and Gaza stares back is what I am left with now, comfortable in my Jerusalem hotel, just hours after looking into their genocide as if I were on a platform at a national park or on the boardwalk at the shore.

The horror of the genocide I expected but did not see. I thought I might curse and cry. I did neither. The cruel and so very human spectacle of a caged people being destroyed as a display for school children was what I encountered. I did not expect that and I don’t know how to respond.

Note: Americans partially funded this observation deck.

These are my first thoughts on standing that close to Gaza. I may need to revisit them.

I am in Palestine this week as part of a delegation to be in solidarity with and learn from those engaged in Palestinian liberation. Today, in addition to this visit to the border of Gaza, we met with Rabbis for Human Rights and an October 7th survivor in the Sderot settlement, as well as a Palestinian Lutheran minister in Bethlehem.

[...]

Source: substack.com/@matthewhoh

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

Thursday 21 November 2024: An important day for peace and justice in the world. Finally, the International Criminal Court (ICC) actually issued world-wide arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) and Israel’s former defence minister Yoav Gallant (b. 1958).

[Note: Gallant was sacked by Netanyahu on tuesday 5th November 2024 and was replaced by Israel Katz (b. 1955) - a severe fascist Zionist and extremist who, among many other things, has argued that Israel should assassinate leaders of the BDS movement]

There are so, so many more Israeli politicians, public figures and regular soldiers who should also come under intense scrutiny and into the consideration of the ICC. As well as any Israeli dual citizen setting their foot outside Israel.

The ICC simultaneously issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Deif (1965-2024), who Israel has claimed was already killed in the Israeli 13 July 2024 al-Mawasi attack. Hamas has denied this claim. Originally, Hamas resistance leaders Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024) and Ismail Haniyeh (1962-2024) also had ICC arrest warrants pending, but they have both been murdered and assassinated by Israel already.

[See also: The Wikipedia long, long List of Israeli Assassinations - For some unknown reason, the UN Security Council envoy and mediator - Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) - is not listed here (He was assassinated by the Zionists in Jerusalem 17 September 1948).]

I’m sure Netanyahu will go back to his true jewish homeland USA and reunite with his son in sunny Florida after a slight reprimand from the so-called Israeli ‘court system’.

See you in Del Boca Vista, Benny. Guess you’ll be playing golf with all your friends at the Mar-a-Lago soon.


ICC Press Release: The Hague, 21 November 2024:

Situation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I rejects the State of Israel’s challenges to jurisdiction and issues warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant

Today, on 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (‘Court’), in its composition for the Situation in the State of Palestine, unanimously issued two decisions rejecting challenges by the State of Israel (‘Israel’) brought under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute (the ‘Statute’). It also issued warrants of arrest for Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant.

Decisions on requests by the State of Israel

The Chamber ruled on two requests submitted by the Israel on 26 September 2024. In the first request, Israel challenged the Court’s jurisdiction over the Situation in the State of Palestine in general, and over Israeli nationals more specifically, on the basis of article 19(2) of the Statute. In the second request, Israel requested that the Chamber order the Prosecution to provide a new notification of the initiation of an investigation to its authorities under article 18(1) of the Statute. Israel also requested the Chamber to halt any proceedings before the Court in the relevant situation, including the consideration of the applications for warrants of arrest for Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant, submitted by the Prosecution on 20 May 2024.

As to the first challenge, the Chamber noted that the acceptance by Israel of the Court’s jurisdiction is not required, as the Court can exercise its jurisdiction on the basis of territorial jurisdiction of Palestine, as determined by Pre-Trial Chamber I in a previous composition. Furthermore, the Chamber considered that pursuant to article 19(1) of the Statute, States are not entitled to challenge the Court’s jurisdiction under article 19(2) prior to the issuance of a warrant of arrest. Thus Israel’s challenge is premature. This is without prejudice to any future possible challenges to the Court’s jurisdiction and/or admissibility of any particular case.

Decision on Israel’s challenge to the jurisdiction of the Court pursuant to article 19(2) of the Rome Statute

The Chamber also rejected Israel’s request under article 18(1) of the Statute. The Chamber recalled that the Prosecution notified Israel of the initiation of an investigation in 2021. At that time, despite a clarification request by the Prosecution, Israel elected not to pursue any request for deferral of the investigation. Further, the Chamber considered that the parameters of the investigation in the situation have remained the same and, as a consequence, no new notification to the State of Israel was required. In light of this, the judges found that there was no reason to halt the consideration of the applications for warrants of arrest.

Decision on Israel’s request for an order to the Prosecution to give an Article 18(1) notice

Warrants of arrest

The Chamber issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.

The arrest warrants are classified as ‘secret’, in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations. However, the Chamber decided to release the information below since conduct similar to that addressed in the warrant of arrest appears to be ongoing. Moreover, the Chamber considers it to be in the interest of victims and their families that they are made aware of the warrants’ existence.

At the outset, the Chamber considered that the alleged conduct of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant falls within the jurisdiction of the Court. The Chamber recalled that, in a previous composition, it already decided that the Court’s jurisdiction in the situation extended to Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Furthermore, the Chamber declined to use its discretionary proprio motu powers [Note: 'on its own impulse'] to determine the admissibility of the two cases at this stage. This is without prejudice to any determination as to the jurisdiction and admissibility of the cases at a later stage.

With regard to the crimes, the Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu, born on 21 October 1949, Prime Minister of Israel at the time of the relevant conduct, and Mr Gallant, born on 8 November 1958, Minister of Defence of Israel at the time of the alleged conduct, each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.

Alleged crimes

The Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that during the relevant time, international humanitarian law related to international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine applied. This is because they are two High Contracting Parties to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and because Israel occupies at least parts of Palestine. The Chamber also found that the law related to non-international armed conflict applied to the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Chamber found that the alleged conduct of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant concerned the activities of Israeli government bodies and the armed forces against the civilian population in Palestine, more specifically civilians in Gaza. It therefore concerned the relationship between two parties to an international armed conflict, as well as the relationship between an occupying power and the population in occupied territory. For these reasons, with regards to war crimes, the Chamber found it appropriate to issue the arrest warrants pursuant to the law of international armed conflict. The Chamber also found that the alleged crimes against humanity were part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.

The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024. This finding is based on the role of Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant in impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal. The Chamber found that their conduct led to the disruption of the ability of humanitarian organisations to provide food and other essential goods to the population in need in Gaza. The aforementioned restrictions together with cutting off electricity and reducing fuel supply also had a severe impact on the availability of water in Gaza and the ability of hospitals to provide medical care.

The Chamber also noted that decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional. They were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law or to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza would be adequately supplied with goods in need. In fact, they were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States of America. In any event, the increases in humanitarian assistance were not sufficient to improve the population’s access to essential goods.

Furthermore, the Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that no clear military need or other justification under international humanitarian law could be identified for the restrictions placed on access for humanitarian relief operations. Despite warnings and appeals made by, inter alia, the UN Security Council, UN Secretary General, States, and governmental and civil society organisations about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, only minimal humanitarian assistance was authorised. In this regard, the Chamber considered the prolonged period of deprivation and Mr Netanyahu’s statement connecting the halt in the essential goods and humanitarian aid with the goals of war.

The Chamber therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.

The Chamber found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies, created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration. On the basis of material presented by the Prosecution covering the period until 20 May 2024, the Chamber could not determine that all elements of the crime against humanity of extermination were met. However, the Chamber did find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the crime against humanity of murder was committed in relation to these victims.

In addition, by intentionally limiting or preventing medical supplies and medicine from getting into Gaza, in particular anaesthetics and anaesthesia machines, the two individuals are also responsible for inflicting great suffering by means of inhumane acts on persons in need of treatment. Doctors were forced to operate on wounded persons and carry out amputations, including on children, without anaesthetics, and/or were forced to use inadequate and unsafe means to sedate patients, causing these persons extreme pain and suffering. This amounts to the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts.

The Chamber also found reasonable grounds to believe that the abovementioned conduct deprived a significant portion of the civilian population in Gaza of their fundamental rights, including the rights to life and health, and that the population was targeted based on political and/or national grounds. It therefore found that the crime against humanity of persecution was committed.

Finally, the Chamber assessed that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza. In this regard, the Chamber found that the material provided by the Prosecution only allowed it to make findings on two incidents that qualified as attacks that were intentionally directed against civilians. Reasonable grounds to believe exist that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant, despite having measures available to them to prevent or repress the commission of crimes or ensure the submittal of the matter to the competent authorities, failed to do so.

Background

On 1 January 2015, The State of Palestine lodged a declaration under article 12(3) of the Rome Statute accepting jurisdiction of the Court since 13 June 2014.

On 2 January 2015, The State of Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute by depositing its instrument of accession with the UN Secretary-General. The Rome Statute entered into force for The State of Palestine on 1 April 2015.

On 22 May 2018, pursuant to articles 13(a) and 14 of the Rome Statute, The State of Palestine referred to the Prosecutor the Situation since 13 June 2014, with no end date.

On 3 March 2021, the Prosecutor announced the opening of the investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine. This followed Pre-Trial Chamber I's decision on 5 February 2021 that the Court could exercise its criminal jurisdiction in the Situation and, by majority, that the territorial scope of this jurisdiction extends to Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

On 17 November 2023, the Office of the Prosecutor received a further referral of the Situation in the State of Palestine, from South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti, and on 18 January 2024, the Republic of Chile and the United Mexican State additionally submitted a referral to the Prosecutor with respect to the situation in The State of Palestine.

For further information, please contact Fadi El Abdallah, Spokesperson and Head of Public Affairs Unit, International Criminal Court, by telephone at: +31 (0)70 515-9152 or +31 (0)6 46448938 or by e-mail at: fadi.el-abdallah@icc-cpi.int

You can also follow the Court's activities on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr

Source: ICC Press Release: Situation in the State of Palestine [...] (Published 21 November 2024)

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Foma Ortho 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 7 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

You must -

Never give up
Never give in
Never stop dreaming

Never betray
Never bend
Never lose hope

Never retreat
Never fear
Never break

Never ever feel like you are less than others

Never judge
Never run away
Never stop believing

Never doubt
Never forget
Never let go

Never imagine that a life is not meant to be lived

Never imagine that you are a number too small

Never break a promise
Never turn your back
Never envy no more

But perhaps you might sense
That you have The Beast in you

So Never
Say Never -

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Mester, min Gud!
Tal til folk!

Mester, min Gud!
Spre ditt ord!

Herre!
Redd Mono Doomen!

- Seigmen: Mono Doomen (1992)

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Hva blir min skjebne?
Når skal jeg dø?

Gi meg en tid
Så jeg veit hva jeg skal si!

En dag blir jeg borte
For alle og en hver

Så dra, før jeg stikker
Ikke bli her!

- Seigmen: Skjebnen (1992)

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Legemet sulter
Kysser stupet

Fører faller
Ned i mørket

Jeg lager keramikk
God akustikk!

Jehova!

Jehova banker på
Jehova banker på

Men de kommer ikke inn
Nei, de kommer ikke inn!

Syk hud
Skalperer sitt indre

Og lar blodet flyte ned
I kjelen hvor jeg

Koker mitt lik!

Jeg kler av min kropp
Jeg kler av min hud

Min innestengte hjerne
Min innestengte hjerne
Min innestengte hjerne

Kommuniserer med Gud!

- Seigmen: Korstoget (1992)

Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Ond sirkel
Sirkulerer

Månen forfaller
Forfaller ned

Tiden kaller
Det ytterste mørke

Solen forfaller
Forfaller ned

- Seigmen: Fra X Til Døden (1992)

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Foma Ortho 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 7 min. @ 20°C)

Sorte byer
Forlater!
Forlater sitt åsted

Sorte fugler
Truffet!
Truffet i hjertet

Blodet strømmer!
Syndefloden!

Det siste lyset
Forakter!
Forakter det dystre

Setter kurs for Mekka
Stille!
Stille i døren

Blodet strømmer!
Syndefloden!

- Seigmen: Syndefloden (1992)

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)

Wikipedia: Gaza genocide

Geh in die Knie
Und klatsch in die Hände
Beweg deine Hüften
Und tanz den Mussolini

Tanz den Mussolini!

Dreh dich nach rechts
Und klatsch in die Hände
Und mach den Adolf Hitler
Tanz den Adolf Hitler

Tanz den Adolf Hitler!

Beweg deinen Hintern
Beweg deinen Hintern
Klatsch in die Hände
Tanz den Jesus Christus

Tanz den Jesus Christus!

- Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft: Der Mussolini (1981) [Vinyl]