• ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’
    Last Updated: Feb. 13, 2024 at 1:20 p.m. ET

    People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters on March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif.
    Getty Images
    Almost a year after the mini banking crisis in the United States, it is worth revisiting the episode. Was it just a tempest in a teacup? Was there really a systemic threat, or was it just a problem with a few banks? Should the interventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury worry or comfort us?

    Recall that three mid-size U.S. banks suddenly failed around March 2023. The most prominent was Silicon Valley Bank, which became the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual in 2008. Roughly 90% of the deposits at SVB were uninsured, and uninsured deposits are prone to runs. Making matters worse, SVB had invested significant sums in long-term bonds, the market value of which fell as interest rates rose. When SVB sold some of these holdings to raise funds, the unrealized losses embedded in its bond portfolio started coming to light. A failed equity offering then triggered a classic bank run.

    It is convenient to think that these issues were confined to just a few rogue banks. But the problem was systemic.

    When the Fed engages in quantitative easing (QE), it buys bonds from financial institutions. Typically, those sellers then deposit the money in their bank, and this results in a large increase in uninsured deposits in the banking system. On the banks’ asset side, there is a corresponding increase in central-bank reserves. This is stable, since reserves are the most liquid asset on the planet and can be used to satisfy any impatient depositors who come for their money. Unfortunately, a number of smaller banks (with less than $50 billion in assets) moved away from this stable position as QE continued.

    Historically, smaller U.S. banks financed themselves conservatively, with uninsured demandable deposits accounting for only around 10% of their liabilities. Yet by the time the Fed was done with its pandemic-era QE, these banks’ uninsured demandable deposits exceeded 30% of liabilities. Though that level was still far below SVB’s, these institutions clearly had drunk from the same firehose.

    Smaller banks were also more conservative about liquidity in the past. At the outset of QE in late 2008, banks with less than $50 billion in assets had reserves (and other assets that could be used to borrow reserves) that exceeded the uninsured demandable deposits they had issued. By early 2023, however, they had issued runnable claims (in aggregate) that were one and a half times the size of their liquid assets. Instead of holding liquid reserves, their assets were now more weighted toward long-term securities and term lending, including a significant share of commercial real-estate (CRE) loans.

    Advertisement
    Thus, as the Fed raised interest rates, the economic value of these banks’ assets fell sharply. Some of the fall was hidden by accounting sleight of hand, but SVB’s sudden demise caused investors to scrutinize banks’ balance sheets more carefully. What they saw did not instill confidence. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index duly fell by over 25%, and deposits started flowing out of a large number of banks, many of which lacked the liquidity to accommodate the sudden outflows. The risk of contagious runs across smaller banks was real, as was the possibly of the problem spreading more widely.

    The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows.

    Importantly, as private money flowed to large banks, very little flowed to small- and medium-size institutions. That is why the authorities had to come to the rescue. Soon after SVB’s demise, the Treasury signaled that no uninsured depositor in small banks would suffer losses in any further bank collapses.

    The Fed opened a generous new facility that lent money for up to one year to banks against the par, or face value, of the securities they held on their balance sheets, without adjusting for the erosion in the value of these securities from higher interest rates. And the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) — effectively an arm of the U.S. government — increased its lending to stressed banks, with total advances to the banking system having already tripled between March 2022 and March 2023 amid the Fed’s policy tightening. Borrowing by small- and medium-size banks from these official sources skyrocketed.

    The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. A potential banking crisis was converted into a slow-burning problem for banks as they recognized and absorbed the losses on their balance sheets.

    Just recently, New York Community Bancorp NYCB, -5.17%, which bought parts of one of the banks that failed in 2023, reminded us that this process is still underway when it announced large losses. With the Russell microcap index of small companies significantly underperforming the S&P 100 index OEX of the largest companies since March 2023, it appears that smaller banks’ troubles have weighed on their traditional clients: small- and medium-size companies.

    Where does that leave us? Although the situation could have been much worse if the Treasury and the Fed had not stepped in, the seeming ease with which the panic was arrested allowed public attention to move on. Apart from die-hard libertarians, no one seems to care much about the extent of the intervention that was needed to rescue the smaller banks, nor has there been any broad inquiry into the circumstances that led to the vulnerabilities.

    As a result, several questions remain unanswered. To what extent were the seeds of the 2023 banking stress sown by the pandemic-induced monetary stimulus and lax supervision of what banks did with the money? Did advances by the FHLBanks delay failed banks’ efforts to raise capital? Are banks that relied on official backstops after SVB’s failure keeping afloat distressed CRE borrowers, and therefore merely postponing an eventual reckoning?

    It is not good for capitalism when those who knowingly take risks — bankers and uninsured depositors, in this case — pay no price when a risk materializes. Despite sweeping banking reforms over the past 15 years, the authorities have once again shown that they are willing to bail out market players if enough of them have taken the same risk.

    “Too big to fail” was bad enough, but now we have “too many to fail.” The mini-crisis of March 2023 was much more than a footnote in banking history. We cannot afford to bury it.

    Raghuram G. Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author, most recently, of Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences (The MIT Press, 2023). Viral V. Acharya, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

    This commentary was published with the permission of Project Syndicate — The Danger of Forgetting the 2023 Banking Crisis.

    More: Regional-bank bondholders seem unworried by New York Community Bank’s problems

    Also read: Recession in 2024? A quarter of economists think it will happen.


    😎🇺🇸🦅 PAR-TY… 🎉. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/too-big-to-fail-was-bad-enough-for-the-banks-now-we-have-too-many-to-fail-d89dcdda
    ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’ Last Updated: Feb. 13, 2024 at 1:20 p.m. ET People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank headquarters on March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, Calif. Getty Images Almost a year after the mini banking crisis in the United States, it is worth revisiting the episode. Was it just a tempest in a teacup? Was there really a systemic threat, or was it just a problem with a few banks? Should the interventions by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury worry or comfort us? Recall that three mid-size U.S. banks suddenly failed around March 2023. The most prominent was Silicon Valley Bank, which became the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, after Washington Mutual in 2008. Roughly 90% of the deposits at SVB were uninsured, and uninsured deposits are prone to runs. Making matters worse, SVB had invested significant sums in long-term bonds, the market value of which fell as interest rates rose. When SVB sold some of these holdings to raise funds, the unrealized losses embedded in its bond portfolio started coming to light. A failed equity offering then triggered a classic bank run. It is convenient to think that these issues were confined to just a few rogue banks. But the problem was systemic. When the Fed engages in quantitative easing (QE), it buys bonds from financial institutions. Typically, those sellers then deposit the money in their bank, and this results in a large increase in uninsured deposits in the banking system. On the banks’ asset side, there is a corresponding increase in central-bank reserves. This is stable, since reserves are the most liquid asset on the planet and can be used to satisfy any impatient depositors who come for their money. Unfortunately, a number of smaller banks (with less than $50 billion in assets) moved away from this stable position as QE continued. Historically, smaller U.S. banks financed themselves conservatively, with uninsured demandable deposits accounting for only around 10% of their liabilities. Yet by the time the Fed was done with its pandemic-era QE, these banks’ uninsured demandable deposits exceeded 30% of liabilities. Though that level was still far below SVB’s, these institutions clearly had drunk from the same firehose. Smaller banks were also more conservative about liquidity in the past. At the outset of QE in late 2008, banks with less than $50 billion in assets had reserves (and other assets that could be used to borrow reserves) that exceeded the uninsured demandable deposits they had issued. By early 2023, however, they had issued runnable claims (in aggregate) that were one and a half times the size of their liquid assets. Instead of holding liquid reserves, their assets were now more weighted toward long-term securities and term lending, including a significant share of commercial real-estate (CRE) loans. Advertisement Thus, as the Fed raised interest rates, the economic value of these banks’ assets fell sharply. Some of the fall was hidden by accounting sleight of hand, but SVB’s sudden demise caused investors to scrutinize banks’ balance sheets more carefully. What they saw did not instill confidence. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index duly fell by over 25%, and deposits started flowing out of a large number of banks, many of which lacked the liquidity to accommodate the sudden outflows. The risk of contagious runs across smaller banks was real, as was the possibly of the problem spreading more widely. The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. Importantly, as private money flowed to large banks, very little flowed to small- and medium-size institutions. That is why the authorities had to come to the rescue. Soon after SVB’s demise, the Treasury signaled that no uninsured depositor in small banks would suffer losses in any further bank collapses. The Fed opened a generous new facility that lent money for up to one year to banks against the par, or face value, of the securities they held on their balance sheets, without adjusting for the erosion in the value of these securities from higher interest rates. And the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBanks) — effectively an arm of the U.S. government — increased its lending to stressed banks, with total advances to the banking system having already tripled between March 2022 and March 2023 amid the Fed’s policy tightening. Borrowing by small- and medium-size banks from these official sources skyrocketed. The Treasury essentially took bank runs off the table, while the Fed provided banks the funds to accommodate the continuing — though no longer panicked — depositor outflows. A potential banking crisis was converted into a slow-burning problem for banks as they recognized and absorbed the losses on their balance sheets. Just recently, New York Community Bancorp NYCB, -5.17%, which bought parts of one of the banks that failed in 2023, reminded us that this process is still underway when it announced large losses. With the Russell microcap index of small companies significantly underperforming the S&P 100 index OEX of the largest companies since March 2023, it appears that smaller banks’ troubles have weighed on their traditional clients: small- and medium-size companies. Where does that leave us? Although the situation could have been much worse if the Treasury and the Fed had not stepped in, the seeming ease with which the panic was arrested allowed public attention to move on. Apart from die-hard libertarians, no one seems to care much about the extent of the intervention that was needed to rescue the smaller banks, nor has there been any broad inquiry into the circumstances that led to the vulnerabilities. As a result, several questions remain unanswered. To what extent were the seeds of the 2023 banking stress sown by the pandemic-induced monetary stimulus and lax supervision of what banks did with the money? Did advances by the FHLBanks delay failed banks’ efforts to raise capital? Are banks that relied on official backstops after SVB’s failure keeping afloat distressed CRE borrowers, and therefore merely postponing an eventual reckoning? It is not good for capitalism when those who knowingly take risks — bankers and uninsured depositors, in this case — pay no price when a risk materializes. Despite sweeping banking reforms over the past 15 years, the authorities have once again shown that they are willing to bail out market players if enough of them have taken the same risk. “Too big to fail” was bad enough, but now we have “too many to fail.” The mini-crisis of March 2023 was much more than a footnote in banking history. We cannot afford to bury it. Raghuram G. Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author, most recently, of Monetary Policy and Its Unintended Consequences (The MIT Press, 2023). Viral V. Acharya, a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. This commentary was published with the permission of Project Syndicate — The Danger of Forgetting the 2023 Banking Crisis. More: Regional-bank bondholders seem unworried by New York Community Bank’s problems Also read: Recession in 2024? A quarter of economists think it will happen. 😎🇺🇸🦅 PAR-TY… 🎉. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/too-big-to-fail-was-bad-enough-for-the-banks-now-we-have-too-many-to-fail-d89dcdda
    WWW.MARKETWATCH.COM
    ‘Too big to fail’ was bad enough for the banks. Now we have ‘too many to fail.’
    The failures may have been confined to just a few rogue banks, but the problem is systemic.
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  • What’s The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the ‘New Nazis’ | VT Foreign Policy
    February 2, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    What’s The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the ‘New Nazis’

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-no-not-new-nazis-by-zahir-ebrahim.html

    Zahir Ebrahim

    January 17, 2009*

    Background Summary

    This is Part-3 of the series of articles on Israel-Palestine I composed especially for VT. Part-3 is my ongoing exposure of what’s taboo in Western press due to the fact that Israel is the new ruling state in the world. Ruling state has the following definition: a state that dictates to the world including through its surrogates and client states, but none can dictate to it; a ruling state does whatever it wants and its slavish clients and prostitute states support it in every way imaginable.

    Part-1 was: Israel’s Barbarianism – How can Israel get away with it? ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2023/11/press-release-israels-barbarianism );

    Part-2 was: 100 Years of Balfour Declaration and Continuing ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/100-years-of-balfour-declaration-and-continuing/ ).

    This third part was previously published in 2009 during Israel’s inhuman assault on Gaza… This latest incarnation assault on Gaza which began on Oct 7, 2023, is in continuation of the long held Zionist premeditated policy of Palestinian population transfer, ethnic cleansing, intermingled with genocidal impulses whenever the holy Jews can get away with it. This latest barbarian assault by Israel was based on the pretext that was an outright MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose), not a LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose), nor a “surprise attack” as Israel and her obliging Western surrogates have propagandized, duly echoed by their Uncle Toms and Aunty Thomases throughout the world’s mass media.

    I called it as such on October 8, 2023, the moment I heard about it in the news, in a series of private emails to some friends and journalists, including VT’s own venerable senior editor and my internet-confrere in common cause of justice of many years, Dr. Kevin Barrett, who wrote on VT on October 30, 2023: Why I Support Hamas – And you should too ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2023/10/why-i-support-hamas/ ).

    Not being a “Doctor” of anything, nor a college professor, as far as I perceive matters as a common man who can reason based on empiricism, and who is not given to presuppositions based on whim, dogma, tribal or religious and cultural affiliations, Hamas is complicit in, or actual part of, this MIHOP operation of Israel. In other words, Hamas was either made a useful idiot by Israel, or is still an asset of Israel just as it was at its inception. The Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, was no more a surprise attack on Israel than Pearl Harbor was on the United States. It was a calculated premeditated creation of legal pretext for what followed. The difference only being MIHOP vs LIHOP. 9/11 too was a MIHOP operation by the United States to create legal pretext using a range of patsies and side shows. Israel did the same. Subsequently, more evidence that Israel may have even had other pecuniary motivations to attack Gaza have been revealed in an oped by Kevin Barrett himself on January 25, 2024, leaving his already dubious support of Hamas even more absurd and unexplainable as to how did Israel get Hamas to become its patsy to enable realize that motivation : Israel Committing Genocide to Steal Gaza’s Gas? – Al-Jazeera cites Western alternative media outlets Global Research and Mondoweiss (see https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/israel-committing-genocide-to-steal-gazas-gas/ ). Contrary to what Jews might think, not all goy are dumb ass.

    The hair-splitting by the goy of Jews being different from Zionists, is the stupidity of goy to not face up to empirical realism. The actual reality is even more perverse. The Jews and Zionism are in fact being used by the same oligarchic powers that used Militant Islam, before that Soviet Communism and Nazi Socialism, to create world wars and controlled conflict, pitting plebe human beings – the common rank and file – against each other under the sound of trumpets. This will be the topics of subsequent parts – all of which are already deeply researched essays in my books (see links for Part 1 & 2) – how the Jews themselves have been indoctrinated into becoming the useful idiots of Zionism, and just as diabolically harvested to construct a single one-world global empire of the oligarchy as other patsies. But as Zionist zombie mass murderers, useful idiots or not, they still cannot escape culpability any more than the Nazis could, nor Germany could, but only under victor’s justice. The honest conscionable Jew who distances himself / herself from the primacy of Israel and settler colonialism of Zionism are part of us goyem in principle as human beings first. The rest are enemies of humankind no different than any villainous mass murderers, including those aliased as Muslims under the imperial label of Militant Islam manufactured by empire as a Hegelian Dialectic (see my book: Hijacking The Holy Qur’an And Its Religion Islam – Muslims and Imperial Mobilization, 2nd Edition 2015, https://tinyurl.com/Islam2e ).

    The fact that the Jews of Israel under Zionism are indoctrinated trigger-pullers of oligarchic masters behind the scenes absolves neither them nor their godfathers who own Israel outright, from their genocidal crimes against humanity. Palestinians are just the canary in the coal mine. The same fate lies in store for all Untermensch on the planet in every country on the new road to The Great Reset that is birth-panging a new global dystopic world order to be administered from the New Ruling State of the world. Not by the Jews of Prophet Moses. But by the atheist
    satanic Khazarian financial Oligarchy with pretenses of being God’s Chosen People from the Abrahamic clan. Yeah, not a dumb goy! And neither should you be taken in by the ploy to make goy stupid and fight amongst ourselves. All that’s needed is a bit of commonsense and the ability to reason away from attractive authority figures. Not college degrees.

    2009 Article Begins

    In reference to the short article by Alan Hart “The New Nazis<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.alanhart.net/the-new-nazis/>” in which he described the mechanics of a possible “Zionist Holocaust” upon the Palestinians, reaching the somewhat belated realization that it was high time that he called the Israelis by their real nom de guerre, “the New Nazis”, I would say he is sadly mistaken in his choice of labels. The Israeli Jews are not the New Nazis. It is convenient to associate them to something abhorrent but irrelevant. What relevance does Nazism have today? None whatsoever. But the more direct relevance to the Settling of the United States of America is not to be drawn – for that might be a wee bit too relevant and uncomfortable.

    President George W. Bush for once had truthfully blurted out the grotesque reality-space while on the 60th birthday-bash visit to Zionistan

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/celebrating-israels-60th-birthday.html

    “Our two nations both faced great challenges when they were founded. And our two nations have both relied on the same principles to help us succeed.”

    The core-principle being, the outright elimination of indigenous peoples, wherein, “the very same army that had recently conquered and occupied the Southern states – led by Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan – mass murdered Indian men, women, and children during the winters, when families would be together, with massive Gatling gun and artillery fire. In a letter to his son a year before he died (1889), Sherman expressed his regret that his armies did not murder every last Indian in North America.”

    The Pious self-righteous Jews of Israel, atheist or orthodox, don’t intend to make the ‘Sherman mistake’ in Palestine! They have noted it time and again that “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”

    But the Jews’ narrative of Holocaust is what remains the most profound and sacred obsession of the ‘civilized’ West – a perennial “mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed.”. And for their detractors, it is merely the New Nazism – when the tortuous reality is located in Washington, in London, in the Pentagon, in EU, and in the massive control of world’s financial systems through the international banksters that is held in the hands of world Jewry!

    So isn’t it rather convenient not to draw upon any of these associations and linkages of support for Israel which is what, in fact, props up that pariah state in Palestine? I must admit I am sometimes guilty of sugar-coating the Zionists as the ‘New Nazis’ myself. But that’s an emotional response based on years of watching Hollywood World War II movies where such labeling of a suitably demonized foe simply falls into the consciousness for associating anything grotesque. A more intellectually honest and empirically accurate depiction of Zionism however, and its power base among the world Jewry, renders an entirely new meaning to the now hackneyed term ‘banality of evil’. The support network of Israel is systemic enough, and its aspirations endemic enough, to make Hannah Arendth turn in her grave.

    The second glossing over by Alan Hart is in his expression of fear of the Zionist Holocaust upon the Palestinians, where he unwittingly absolves the world Jewry of their direct involvement with Israel: “unless enough Israelis and the Jews of the world are prepared to acknowledge that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism (the few) in the name of all Jews.”
    That statement has no basis in reality. It is not just “Zionism (the few) in the name of all Jews”, but the direct and active participation of most of world Jewry in the Israel project.
    Here are two short excerpts from two very different perspectives. They explain the afore-stated point much better than I can today, emotionally drained that I am watching the systematic and deliberate killing of children, women, men, and anything that lives, in Gaza which conjures up the image of the gatling-gun set loose upon the defenseless native American Indians by Sherman.
    The first excerpt is from the 1996 memoirs of Brigadier Syed A. I. Tirmazi, SI (M), Director of ISI, Pakistan, titled ‘Profiles of Intelligence’, Chapter 3, pages 45-46. Under the subsection titled “Why did the ISI not intervene to save Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto if they knew he was being murdered”, the top spymaster of Pakistan during ZAB’s and his executioner General Zia ul Haq’s era, writes (and do pay particular attention to the last paragraph, emphasis mine):

    Begin Excerpt (Profiles of Intelligence)

    … It would be fair to ask what we [the ISI] did to counter the US machinations? Well we did not, and could not do any thing beyond reporting to the highest authority in the country. There are reasons for our inaction:

    One, neither the ISI nor the IB is designed or equipped to counter the machinations of a Super Power.

    Two, an important factor is our own price. A lot has been said and written by some of our American friends about the price of a Pakistani. Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore, once said, “Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky.” He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price.

    Three, in order to bring the taking of appropriate counter measures within the ambit of ISI functions, a revolutionary reorientation of minds at the national level and of the systems and institutions at the State level becomes imperative. Are we, as a nation, and as we stand today, morally capable of bringing about such a change in our attitudes and our thinking? I believe we are not. I also believe that the day we acquire the capability, it will mark the end of all our problems, troubles and misfortunes. We will learn to manage out affairs ourselves.

    Four, probably, the most formidable hurdle in the way to our self-respect and self-reliance is the breed of salable ‘elite’ among us. Specimens of this breed are available in all models and also in abundance. They are active in many deceptive and diversionary forms to ‘strike a deal’ at the cost of our vital national interests. Is there a remedy for this cancerous growth?

    Five, many of our countrymen would not cooperate with the C.I. men. My study on the Israeli Intelligence revealed that, apart from other elements, a major factor for their successes has been the cooperation that a Mossad man gets from the Jews. It claimed that a Jew, in any corner of the world, whenever approached by an Israeli Intelligence agent, would provide him with maximum help and assistance. (pages 45-46)

    End Excerpt

    The second excerpt is from the recent book of a former Israeli Jew who served with the IDF, turned Christian pacifist, Israel Adam Shamir. He writes in the Introduction of his book “Masters of Discourse”, an eloquent politically incorrect exposition of the relationship of the world Jewry to Israel. I had previously quoted from that book in my “Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/06/letter-to-palestinian-intellectuals.html>”, and here is the excerpt from that letter:

    Begin Excerpt (Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals by Project Humanbeingsfirst)

    This is also why the exponents of Israel entirely control the global discourse on Israel-Palestine throughout the world, even among the ruling elite in the Muslim nations, not to mention among the Palestinian ruling elite itself, none of which reflects either any deep comprehension of the manifest reality on the ground, or the aspirations of the Palestinian masses. These are the Masters of Discourse, and a far more formidable foe across the world’s Jewry than the Palestinians seem to apprehend – as they continually losingly engage the foot soldiers among their antagonists and not the real power-wielders!

    Israel Shamir notes in the English Introduction to his new book

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Discourse-Israel-Shamir/dp/1419692437

    the following veritable truth which must by now be self-evident to all who are able to comprehend the power of the concept of “Der Judenstaadt” on the global Jewish psyche which carries upon its bent backs, the weight of three thousand years of history

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=avh6dkSop0EC&dq=Israel+Shahak&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=Lu84cAhe0q&sig=Z2SGKxTq0rxAlKDwnFsSA-eLR7U

    (also Jewish History, Jewish Religion

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-History-Religion-Thousand-Eastern/dp/0745308198>):

    The new Jewish elite did not fully identify with Russia but carried out a separate policy. It had a fateful effect in 1991, when over 50 % of the Jews (as opposed to 13 % of the Russians) supported the pro-Western coup of President Yeltsin. In 1995, 81% of the Jews voted for pro-Western parties, and only 3% for the Communists (as opposed to 46% of Russians), according to the publication by the Jewish sociologist Dr. Ryvkina in her book, Jews in Post-Soviet Russia (1996).

    In ever-expanding America, the Jews did not have to kill or remove the native elites; they became its important part, controlling discourse and wielding considerable financial clout. They still do not identify with the goyish America: they force the Congress and the Administration to send billions of dollars to their Israeli offshoot, they forced the US to break Iraq to pieces, and now they are trying to let America fight their war in Iran, though it brings disaster to America. They do discriminate against other Americans; otherwise 60% of the leading positions in the media would not become Jewish.

    Jews of France do not identify with France, either. “Their identification with Israel is so strong, it overshadows their ties to the country they live in,” writes Daniel Ben Simon in Haaretz. This dual loyalty was made very clear to me by a Jewish doctor in Nice. “If the choice is between Israel and France, there’s no question I feel closer to Israel,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. He was born and bred in France; he went to medical school in France; his patients are French; he speaks French with his wife and children. But in the depths of his heart, he feels a greater affinity with the Jewish state.

    In Palestine, the Jews have no compassion for the natives. They travel by segregated roads, study in segregated schools, while a Jew consumes ten times more water resources than a goy, and has an income seven times higher. Thus, the Jewish separateness remains a fact of life for many Jewish communities.

    While the Palestinian intellectual and revolutionary need not adopt the discourse of European anti-Semitism – cousins as they are of their oppressors – they do need to comprehend the immense psychological and sociological power of that discourse, and the power of the world Jewry in sustaining the Jewish State because of it. The significance of this statement is made evident by the fact that this discourse prevailed upon not only the very Evangelical Christian American President George W. Bush, but also the Christian Prime Minister of Germany, Angela Merkel, the Christian Prime Minister of France, Nicholas Sarkozy**, the Roman Catholic Christian Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, and the Christian Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, along with the Queen of England, representing the world’s most powerful Christian coalition of Western Hegemons, to pay homage to Jewish Zionistan on May 15, 2008

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3540751,00.html.

    None showed up, even in false courtesy, to offer their feeble condolences for the Nakba to what remains of the Palestinian Reservations!

    End Excerpt

    And this state of affairs was finally admitted to by the Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah, Khalid Amayreh. Writing from Ramallah for the Palestinian Information Center, he was finally forced to acknowledge the grotesque reality of this Jewish power in his article “When it comes to Israel , Europe is hypocritical, submissive and obsequious

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://tinyurl.com/4n3rxb.

    Excerpting from the same Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals, where I had quoted Khalid Amayreh:

    Begin Excerpt

    In comparison to the madman in the White House, Europe may look less bellicose, less confrontational and less unreasonable in its overall approach to contentious international issues. However, when the issue is the Palestinian plight, the US and Europe look very much like tweedledee and tweedledum.

    In recent months and years, European leaders from Germany’s Merkel, to France’s Sarkozy, to Britain’s Brown and Italy’s Berlusconi were shamelessly pandering to Israeli savagery to the extent of embracing relentless Israeli criminality against the Palestinian people , including the ongoing genocidal ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly in the Gaza Strip.

    True, the European tone of speech often sounds less odious especially when compared with the unmitigated saber-rattling coming from Washington. But, in the final analysis, the outcome in both cases is similar. In fact, the US and Europe collaborate and even collude to effect the same unethical goals often by playing the old game of Mutt and Jeff (good cop and bad cop), with their persecuted victims, whether in Palestine, Sudan or Iran.

    End Excerpt

    The points being made here are admittedly nuanced and subtle, but crucial and fundamental nevertheless in correctly identifying the monster that feeds on Blood-Sacrifice of the Palestinians. The Zionists are not following in the footsteps of the Nazis, although they are certainly using many of the Nazi tactics. They are following in the veritable footsteps of the United States of America, and are religiously principled in their not making the ‘Sherman mistake’. This is empirically so blatantly obvious that even the conscionable among the Israeli Jews reluctantly admit it. The late Tanya Reinhart, professor of linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in her 2002 book “How to end the war of 1948

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Palestine-How-End-1948/dp/1583225382 :

    “The state of Israel founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time – 1,380,000 people – were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This is not a process unfamiliar in history. Israel’s actions remain incomparable to the massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and government of the United states.”

    The world Jewry is in on the game of conquest, in many different guises, with many different incantations of power, and with full spectrum political and financial support. The biggest support to Israel comes from the United States Congress and the Federal Government, financially, politically, militarily, as well as legally. Just witness this mind numbing Antiboycott Compliance

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm

    bureau especially constructed for Israel’s sake. It states:

    “The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau.”

    So what is this red herring of calling Israelis “The New Nazis”, without also calling its parent the Fourth Reich? Further evidence of sophisticated and rather devilish support of Israel may be gleaned in Project Humanbeingsfirst’s report “The endless trial of red herrings

    https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html “.

    The day the World Jewry asserts that they will live equitably in a single-state with the indigenous Palestinians, with restoration of full right of return to the displaced and their progeny, and fair compensation for pain and suffering that is due all the native populations of Palestine and their progeny for cataclysmic upheaval inflicted upon them since the first World Jewish Congress meeting in Basle Switzerland in 1896, then that very fine day, the Shoah of the Palestinians will miraculously end.

    Such a fair and just articulation of demand is more than the mere recognition of great wrongs being done the Palestinians. It is of no less measure, both quantitatively as well as qualitatively, than what the Jews have themselves extracted with their specialized and incomprehensible Holocaust narrative from the world.

    Let the Palestinian people not be sold short by those who claim to support them – even if they be Palestinian themselves! Their ruling elite has already sold the beleaguered people down the drain of ineptitude and corruption. Let their friends, unwittingly, not do the same.

    Thank you.

    * Footnote: Excerpts from this article first appeared as comment on January 18, 2009 on former Pakistani-Canadian journalist Abidullah Jan’s famous (now defunct) dictatorshipwatch.com:

    https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/cacheof-the-undeniable-nazism-and-holocaust-in-our-age-dw-abidullahjan-zahir-comment-january182009.pdf<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/cacheof-the-undeniable-nazism-and-holocaust-in-our-age-dw-abidullahjan-zahir-comment-january182009.pdf>



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    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/whats-the-difference-between-jews-and-zionists-no-no-not-the-new-nazis/

    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/whats-difference-between-jews-and.html

    https://telegra.ph/Whats-The-Difference-Between-Jews-and-Zionists-No-No--Not-the-New-Nazis--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-10
    What’s The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the ‘New Nazis’ | VT Foreign Policy February 2, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. What’s The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the ‘New Nazis’ https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-no-not-new-nazis-by-zahir-ebrahim.html Zahir Ebrahim January 17, 2009* Background Summary This is Part-3 of the series of articles on Israel-Palestine I composed especially for VT. Part-3 is my ongoing exposure of what’s taboo in Western press due to the fact that Israel is the new ruling state in the world. Ruling state has the following definition: a state that dictates to the world including through its surrogates and client states, but none can dictate to it; a ruling state does whatever it wants and its slavish clients and prostitute states support it in every way imaginable. Part-1 was: Israel’s Barbarianism – How can Israel get away with it? ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2023/11/press-release-israels-barbarianism ); Part-2 was: 100 Years of Balfour Declaration and Continuing ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/100-years-of-balfour-declaration-and-continuing/ ). This third part was previously published in 2009 during Israel’s inhuman assault on Gaza… This latest incarnation assault on Gaza which began on Oct 7, 2023, is in continuation of the long held Zionist premeditated policy of Palestinian population transfer, ethnic cleansing, intermingled with genocidal impulses whenever the holy Jews can get away with it. This latest barbarian assault by Israel was based on the pretext that was an outright MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose), not a LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose), nor a “surprise attack” as Israel and her obliging Western surrogates have propagandized, duly echoed by their Uncle Toms and Aunty Thomases throughout the world’s mass media. I called it as such on October 8, 2023, the moment I heard about it in the news, in a series of private emails to some friends and journalists, including VT’s own venerable senior editor and my internet-confrere in common cause of justice of many years, Dr. Kevin Barrett, who wrote on VT on October 30, 2023: Why I Support Hamas – And you should too ( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2023/10/why-i-support-hamas/ ). Not being a “Doctor” of anything, nor a college professor, as far as I perceive matters as a common man who can reason based on empiricism, and who is not given to presuppositions based on whim, dogma, tribal or religious and cultural affiliations, Hamas is complicit in, or actual part of, this MIHOP operation of Israel. In other words, Hamas was either made a useful idiot by Israel, or is still an asset of Israel just as it was at its inception. The Oct 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas, was no more a surprise attack on Israel than Pearl Harbor was on the United States. It was a calculated premeditated creation of legal pretext for what followed. The difference only being MIHOP vs LIHOP. 9/11 too was a MIHOP operation by the United States to create legal pretext using a range of patsies and side shows. Israel did the same. Subsequently, more evidence that Israel may have even had other pecuniary motivations to attack Gaza have been revealed in an oped by Kevin Barrett himself on January 25, 2024, leaving his already dubious support of Hamas even more absurd and unexplainable as to how did Israel get Hamas to become its patsy to enable realize that motivation : Israel Committing Genocide to Steal Gaza’s Gas? – Al-Jazeera cites Western alternative media outlets Global Research and Mondoweiss (see https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/israel-committing-genocide-to-steal-gazas-gas/ ). Contrary to what Jews might think, not all goy are dumb ass. The hair-splitting by the goy of Jews being different from Zionists, is the stupidity of goy to not face up to empirical realism. The actual reality is even more perverse. The Jews and Zionism are in fact being used by the same oligarchic powers that used Militant Islam, before that Soviet Communism and Nazi Socialism, to create world wars and controlled conflict, pitting plebe human beings – the common rank and file – against each other under the sound of trumpets. This will be the topics of subsequent parts – all of which are already deeply researched essays in my books (see links for Part 1 & 2) – how the Jews themselves have been indoctrinated into becoming the useful idiots of Zionism, and just as diabolically harvested to construct a single one-world global empire of the oligarchy as other patsies. But as Zionist zombie mass murderers, useful idiots or not, they still cannot escape culpability any more than the Nazis could, nor Germany could, but only under victor’s justice. The honest conscionable Jew who distances himself / herself from the primacy of Israel and settler colonialism of Zionism are part of us goyem in principle as human beings first. The rest are enemies of humankind no different than any villainous mass murderers, including those aliased as Muslims under the imperial label of Militant Islam manufactured by empire as a Hegelian Dialectic (see my book: Hijacking The Holy Qur’an And Its Religion Islam – Muslims and Imperial Mobilization, 2nd Edition 2015, https://tinyurl.com/Islam2e ). The fact that the Jews of Israel under Zionism are indoctrinated trigger-pullers of oligarchic masters behind the scenes absolves neither them nor their godfathers who own Israel outright, from their genocidal crimes against humanity. Palestinians are just the canary in the coal mine. The same fate lies in store for all Untermensch on the planet in every country on the new road to The Great Reset that is birth-panging a new global dystopic world order to be administered from the New Ruling State of the world. Not by the Jews of Prophet Moses. But by the atheist satanic Khazarian financial Oligarchy with pretenses of being God’s Chosen People from the Abrahamic clan. Yeah, not a dumb goy! And neither should you be taken in by the ploy to make goy stupid and fight amongst ourselves. All that’s needed is a bit of commonsense and the ability to reason away from attractive authority figures. Not college degrees. 2009 Article Begins In reference to the short article by Alan Hart “The New Nazis<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.alanhart.net/the-new-nazis/>” in which he described the mechanics of a possible “Zionist Holocaust” upon the Palestinians, reaching the somewhat belated realization that it was high time that he called the Israelis by their real nom de guerre, “the New Nazis”, I would say he is sadly mistaken in his choice of labels. The Israeli Jews are not the New Nazis. It is convenient to associate them to something abhorrent but irrelevant. What relevance does Nazism have today? None whatsoever. But the more direct relevance to the Settling of the United States of America is not to be drawn – for that might be a wee bit too relevant and uncomfortable. President George W. Bush for once had truthfully blurted out the grotesque reality-space while on the 60th birthday-bash visit to Zionistan https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/05/celebrating-israels-60th-birthday.html “Our two nations both faced great challenges when they were founded. And our two nations have both relied on the same principles to help us succeed.” The core-principle being, the outright elimination of indigenous peoples, wherein, “the very same army that had recently conquered and occupied the Southern states – led by Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan – mass murdered Indian men, women, and children during the winters, when families would be together, with massive Gatling gun and artillery fire. In a letter to his son a year before he died (1889), Sherman expressed his regret that his armies did not murder every last Indian in North America.” The Pious self-righteous Jews of Israel, atheist or orthodox, don’t intend to make the ‘Sherman mistake’ in Palestine! They have noted it time and again that “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel … Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” But the Jews’ narrative of Holocaust is what remains the most profound and sacred obsession of the ‘civilized’ West – a perennial “mystery whose parallel may only be the one of Sinai when something was revealed.”. And for their detractors, it is merely the New Nazism – when the tortuous reality is located in Washington, in London, in the Pentagon, in EU, and in the massive control of world’s financial systems through the international banksters that is held in the hands of world Jewry! So isn’t it rather convenient not to draw upon any of these associations and linkages of support for Israel which is what, in fact, props up that pariah state in Palestine? I must admit I am sometimes guilty of sugar-coating the Zionists as the ‘New Nazis’ myself. But that’s an emotional response based on years of watching Hollywood World War II movies where such labeling of a suitably demonized foe simply falls into the consciousness for associating anything grotesque. A more intellectually honest and empirically accurate depiction of Zionism however, and its power base among the world Jewry, renders an entirely new meaning to the now hackneyed term ‘banality of evil’. The support network of Israel is systemic enough, and its aspirations endemic enough, to make Hannah Arendth turn in her grave. The second glossing over by Alan Hart is in his expression of fear of the Zionist Holocaust upon the Palestinians, where he unwittingly absolves the world Jewry of their direct involvement with Israel: “unless enough Israelis and the Jews of the world are prepared to acknowledge that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism (the few) in the name of all Jews.” That statement has no basis in reality. It is not just “Zionism (the few) in the name of all Jews”, but the direct and active participation of most of world Jewry in the Israel project. Here are two short excerpts from two very different perspectives. They explain the afore-stated point much better than I can today, emotionally drained that I am watching the systematic and deliberate killing of children, women, men, and anything that lives, in Gaza which conjures up the image of the gatling-gun set loose upon the defenseless native American Indians by Sherman. The first excerpt is from the 1996 memoirs of Brigadier Syed A. I. Tirmazi, SI (M), Director of ISI, Pakistan, titled ‘Profiles of Intelligence’, Chapter 3, pages 45-46. Under the subsection titled “Why did the ISI not intervene to save Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto if they knew he was being murdered”, the top spymaster of Pakistan during ZAB’s and his executioner General Zia ul Haq’s era, writes (and do pay particular attention to the last paragraph, emphasis mine): Begin Excerpt (Profiles of Intelligence) … It would be fair to ask what we [the ISI] did to counter the US machinations? Well we did not, and could not do any thing beyond reporting to the highest authority in the country. There are reasons for our inaction: One, neither the ISI nor the IB is designed or equipped to counter the machinations of a Super Power. Two, an important factor is our own price. A lot has been said and written by some of our American friends about the price of a Pakistani. Dr. Andrew V. Corry, US Counsel General at Lahore, once said, “Price of a Pakistani oscillates between a free trip to the US and a bottle of whisky.” He may not be too far wrong. We did observe some highly placed Pakistanis selling their conscience, prestige, dignity and self-respect for a small price. Three, in order to bring the taking of appropriate counter measures within the ambit of ISI functions, a revolutionary reorientation of minds at the national level and of the systems and institutions at the State level becomes imperative. Are we, as a nation, and as we stand today, morally capable of bringing about such a change in our attitudes and our thinking? I believe we are not. I also believe that the day we acquire the capability, it will mark the end of all our problems, troubles and misfortunes. We will learn to manage out affairs ourselves. Four, probably, the most formidable hurdle in the way to our self-respect and self-reliance is the breed of salable ‘elite’ among us. Specimens of this breed are available in all models and also in abundance. They are active in many deceptive and diversionary forms to ‘strike a deal’ at the cost of our vital national interests. Is there a remedy for this cancerous growth? Five, many of our countrymen would not cooperate with the C.I. men. My study on the Israeli Intelligence revealed that, apart from other elements, a major factor for their successes has been the cooperation that a Mossad man gets from the Jews. It claimed that a Jew, in any corner of the world, whenever approached by an Israeli Intelligence agent, would provide him with maximum help and assistance. (pages 45-46) End Excerpt The second excerpt is from the recent book of a former Israeli Jew who served with the IDF, turned Christian pacifist, Israel Adam Shamir. He writes in the Introduction of his book “Masters of Discourse”, an eloquent politically incorrect exposition of the relationship of the world Jewry to Israel. I had previously quoted from that book in my “Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2008/06/letter-to-palestinian-intellectuals.html>”, and here is the excerpt from that letter: Begin Excerpt (Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals by Project Humanbeingsfirst) This is also why the exponents of Israel entirely control the global discourse on Israel-Palestine throughout the world, even among the ruling elite in the Muslim nations, not to mention among the Palestinian ruling elite itself, none of which reflects either any deep comprehension of the manifest reality on the ground, or the aspirations of the Palestinian masses. These are the Masters of Discourse, and a far more formidable foe across the world’s Jewry than the Palestinians seem to apprehend – as they continually losingly engage the foot soldiers among their antagonists and not the real power-wielders! Israel Shamir notes in the English Introduction to his new book https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Masters-Discourse-Israel-Shamir/dp/1419692437 the following veritable truth which must by now be self-evident to all who are able to comprehend the power of the concept of “Der Judenstaadt” on the global Jewish psyche which carries upon its bent backs, the weight of three thousand years of history https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=avh6dkSop0EC&dq=Israel+Shahak&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=Lu84cAhe0q&sig=Z2SGKxTq0rxAlKDwnFsSA-eLR7U (also Jewish History, Jewish Religion https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-History-Religion-Thousand-Eastern/dp/0745308198>): The new Jewish elite did not fully identify with Russia but carried out a separate policy. It had a fateful effect in 1991, when over 50 % of the Jews (as opposed to 13 % of the Russians) supported the pro-Western coup of President Yeltsin. In 1995, 81% of the Jews voted for pro-Western parties, and only 3% for the Communists (as opposed to 46% of Russians), according to the publication by the Jewish sociologist Dr. Ryvkina in her book, Jews in Post-Soviet Russia (1996). In ever-expanding America, the Jews did not have to kill or remove the native elites; they became its important part, controlling discourse and wielding considerable financial clout. They still do not identify with the goyish America: they force the Congress and the Administration to send billions of dollars to their Israeli offshoot, they forced the US to break Iraq to pieces, and now they are trying to let America fight their war in Iran, though it brings disaster to America. They do discriminate against other Americans; otherwise 60% of the leading positions in the media would not become Jewish. Jews of France do not identify with France, either. “Their identification with Israel is so strong, it overshadows their ties to the country they live in,” writes Daniel Ben Simon in Haaretz. This dual loyalty was made very clear to me by a Jewish doctor in Nice. “If the choice is between Israel and France, there’s no question I feel closer to Israel,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. He was born and bred in France; he went to medical school in France; his patients are French; he speaks French with his wife and children. But in the depths of his heart, he feels a greater affinity with the Jewish state. In Palestine, the Jews have no compassion for the natives. They travel by segregated roads, study in segregated schools, while a Jew consumes ten times more water resources than a goy, and has an income seven times higher. Thus, the Jewish separateness remains a fact of life for many Jewish communities. While the Palestinian intellectual and revolutionary need not adopt the discourse of European anti-Semitism – cousins as they are of their oppressors – they do need to comprehend the immense psychological and sociological power of that discourse, and the power of the world Jewry in sustaining the Jewish State because of it. The significance of this statement is made evident by the fact that this discourse prevailed upon not only the very Evangelical Christian American President George W. Bush, but also the Christian Prime Minister of Germany, Angela Merkel, the Christian Prime Minister of France, Nicholas Sarkozy**, the Roman Catholic Christian Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, and the Christian Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, along with the Queen of England, representing the world’s most powerful Christian coalition of Western Hegemons, to pay homage to Jewish Zionistan on May 15, 2008 https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3540751,00.html. None showed up, even in false courtesy, to offer their feeble condolences for the Nakba to what remains of the Palestinian Reservations! End Excerpt And this state of affairs was finally admitted to by the Palestinian journalist based in Ramallah, Khalid Amayreh. Writing from Ramallah for the Palestinian Information Center, he was finally forced to acknowledge the grotesque reality of this Jewish power in his article “When it comes to Israel , Europe is hypocritical, submissive and obsequious https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://tinyurl.com/4n3rxb. Excerpting from the same Open Letter to Palestinian Intellectuals, where I had quoted Khalid Amayreh: Begin Excerpt In comparison to the madman in the White House, Europe may look less bellicose, less confrontational and less unreasonable in its overall approach to contentious international issues. However, when the issue is the Palestinian plight, the US and Europe look very much like tweedledee and tweedledum. In recent months and years, European leaders from Germany’s Merkel, to France’s Sarkozy, to Britain’s Brown and Italy’s Berlusconi were shamelessly pandering to Israeli savagery to the extent of embracing relentless Israeli criminality against the Palestinian people , including the ongoing genocidal ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories, particularly in the Gaza Strip. True, the European tone of speech often sounds less odious especially when compared with the unmitigated saber-rattling coming from Washington. But, in the final analysis, the outcome in both cases is similar. In fact, the US and Europe collaborate and even collude to effect the same unethical goals often by playing the old game of Mutt and Jeff (good cop and bad cop), with their persecuted victims, whether in Palestine, Sudan or Iran. End Excerpt The points being made here are admittedly nuanced and subtle, but crucial and fundamental nevertheless in correctly identifying the monster that feeds on Blood-Sacrifice of the Palestinians. The Zionists are not following in the footsteps of the Nazis, although they are certainly using many of the Nazi tactics. They are following in the veritable footsteps of the United States of America, and are religiously principled in their not making the ‘Sherman mistake’. This is empirically so blatantly obvious that even the conscionable among the Israeli Jews reluctantly admit it. The late Tanya Reinhart, professor of linguistics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, noted in her 2002 book “How to end the war of 1948 https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.amazon.com/Israel-Palestine-How-End-1948/dp/1583225382 : “The state of Israel founded in 1948 following a war which the Israelis call the War of Independence, and the Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe. A haunted, persecuted people sought to find a shelter and a state for itself, and did so at a horrible price to another people. During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time – 1,380,000 people – were driven off their homeland by the Israeli army. Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after 1948 war. Thus, the Israeli land was obtained through ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants. This is not a process unfamiliar in history. Israel’s actions remain incomparable to the massive ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by the settlers and government of the United states.” The world Jewry is in on the game of conquest, in many different guises, with many different incantations of power, and with full spectrum political and financial support. The biggest support to Israel comes from the United States Congress and the Federal Government, financially, politically, militarily, as well as legally. Just witness this mind numbing Antiboycott Compliance https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://www.bis.doc.gov/complianceandenforcement/antiboycottcompliance.htm bureau especially constructed for Israel’s sake. It states: “The Bureau is charged with administering and enforcing the Antiboycott Laws under the Export Administration Act. Those laws discourage, and in some circumstances, prohibit U.S. companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel sponsored by the Arab League, and certain Moslem countries, including complying with certain requests for information designed to verify compliance with the boycott. Compliance with such requests may be prohibited by the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and may be reportable to the Bureau.” So what is this red herring of calling Israelis “The New Nazis”, without also calling its parent the Fourth Reich? Further evidence of sophisticated and rather devilish support of Israel may be gleaned in Project Humanbeingsfirst’s report “The endless trial of red herrings https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2007/03/endless-red-herrings.html “. The day the World Jewry asserts that they will live equitably in a single-state with the indigenous Palestinians, with restoration of full right of return to the displaced and their progeny, and fair compensation for pain and suffering that is due all the native populations of Palestine and their progeny for cataclysmic upheaval inflicted upon them since the first World Jewish Congress meeting in Basle Switzerland in 1896, then that very fine day, the Shoah of the Palestinians will miraculously end. Such a fair and just articulation of demand is more than the mere recognition of great wrongs being done the Palestinians. It is of no less measure, both quantitatively as well as qualitatively, than what the Jews have themselves extracted with their specialized and incomprehensible Holocaust narrative from the world. Let the Palestinian people not be sold short by those who claim to support them – even if they be Palestinian themselves! Their ruling elite has already sold the beleaguered people down the drain of ineptitude and corruption. Let their friends, unwittingly, not do the same. Thank you. * Footnote: Excerpts from this article first appeared as comment on January 18, 2009 on former Pakistani-Canadian journalist Abidullah Jan’s famous (now defunct) dictatorshipwatch.com: https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/cacheof-the-undeniable-nazism-and-holocaust-in-our-age-dw-abidullahjan-zahir-comment-january182009.pdf<https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/https://sites.google.com/site/humanbeingsfirst/download-pdf/cacheof-the-undeniable-nazism-and-holocaust-in-our-age-dw-abidullahjan-zahir-comment-january182009.pdf> ATTENTION READERS We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion. About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT. https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/02/whats-the-difference-between-jews-and-zionists-no-no-not-the-new-nazis/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/whats-difference-between-jews-and.html https://telegra.ph/Whats-The-Difference-Between-Jews-and-Zionists-No-No--Not-the-New-Nazis--VT-Foreign-Policy-03-10
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    What’s The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the ‘New Nazis’
    What's The Difference Between Jews and Zionists: No, No – Not the 'New Nazis' https://web.archive.org/web/20191206190948/http://print-humanbeingsfirst.blogspot.com/2009/01/no-no-not-new-nazis-by-zahir-ebrahim.html Zahir Ebrahim January 17, 2009* Background Summary This is Part-3 of the series of articles on Israel-Palestine I composed especially for VT. Part-3 is my ongoing exposure of what's taboo in Western press due to the fact that Israel...
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  • The 'Hamas human shield' justification for Israeli war crimes
    Zionist projection is the default Hasbara strategy

    vanessa beeley

    What separates Israel, the United States and other democracies when it comes to incredibly difficult situations like this is our respect for international law and, as appropriate, the laws of war. We do everything we can, in these situations, to avoid civilian casualties.

    That is in direct contrast with Hamas which uses people as human shields. It [Hamas] actually seeks to put Palestinian civilians in situations where they could be harmed. This is very much part of the game plan. We know Israel will take all the precautions it can, just as we would, again that is what separates us from Hamas and terrorist groups that engage in the most heinous kind of activities

    US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken

    If you actually listen to the clip of Blinken justifying Israeli brutality you will hear how he stumbles over his words. He knows he is lying in my opinion. The 4000 plus dead children, 10,328 dead civilians, 26000 injured and 2300 missing believed buried under the rubble of Israeli bombs does not substantiate Blinken’s claims of adherence to international law.

    The Israeli bombing of humanitarian convoys, ambulances, paramedics, Civil Defence headquarters, journalists - 50 killed so far, hospitals, makeshift refugee centres, places of worship - mosques and churches, schools, UNWRA facilities, humanitarian aid supplies including essential bottled water supplies, sewage treatment plants, bridges, solar panels, electricity and internet, media buildings, fisherman’s boats, flour stores, burning of food crops - all these targets are in direct violation of any rule of war or human rights conventions.

    The deliberate policy of starvation and the cutting off of water, food, fuel and electricity supplies is a genocidal policy:

    According to Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli war of starvation has taken very dangerous turns, including cutting off all food supplies to the Northern half and bombing and destroying factories, bakeries, food stores, water stations, and tanks throughout the entire enclave.

    Soaring malnutrition cases especially among pregnant women and children. A Euromed report confirms that “women and children in Gaza are disproportionately suffering from the effects of Israel's war. Approximately 52,500 infants in Gaza are currently at risk of starvation, death, dehydration, and other health hazards due to overcrowding, in addition to 55,000 pregnant women, of whom 5,500 are expected to give birth this month.”

    “According to Euro-Med Monitor, getting bread in the Gaza Strip has become an existential challenge, since Gaza’s sole mill there is still unable to grind wheat because of a shortage of fuel and electricity. Since October 7, 11 bakeries have been bombed and destroyed, while the ones that are still operating face tremendous difficulties due to fuel and flour shortages.”

    Israel has been blatant about its genocidal policies. Blinken disappears the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza in his statement. Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, has not only described the bombing of Gaza as “amazing”, he has recommended nuking Gaza and sending Palestinians to Ireland or the desert. According to a Times of Israel article:

    Eliyahu also voices his objection during the interview to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and charging that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”

    “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

    He says the northern Strip has no right to exist, adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.”

    Corpses rotting under rubble, shallow and hastily dug mass graves. Chemicals believed to be used by Israel in the bombing campaigns including White Phosphorous - all these factors spell disaster when the rains come.

    Gaza is a strip of land the size of the Isle of Wight ( 40km X 12km) with a population of 2.2 million civilians. With the forced evacuation by Israel from the north to the south - you will have 2.2 million civilians living in an area half its original size.

    Israel has destroyed Gaza’s ability to desalinate water to provide clean drinking water or to effectively pump sewage out of the strip. When the rains come, disease will be rife with sewage, decaying bodies, chemicals, disease flooding the enclave.

    Even in so-called peace time children are used to wading through sewage to get to school. Children are forced to swim in raw sewage in the sea off the Gaza coast. This pollution will be exponentially increased by the latest Israeli aggression.

    Added to this, the targeting of hospitals and health centers will result in chronic illness patients dying from lack of available treatment. Euromed - “more than 2,000 cancer patients, more than 1,000 patients in need of dialysis to survive, 50,000 cardiovascular patients, and over 60,000 diabetics—urgently need access to basic healthcare services considering the severe shortage of medications, medical supplies, fuel, food, and clean water.” These patients are not given priority because of the massive influx of emergency cases from the Israeli bombing raids. As Euromed Monitor reports:

    Eighteen out of 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped operating so far, according to local health officials there. Overall, 120 health institutions have been targeted, while more than 48 primary care centres (70%) are now out of service due to the ongoing Israeli raids and the fuel crisis.

    The Hamas Human Shield trope

    The claim that Hamas or as I prefer to call it, the Palestinian Resistance coalition, use Palestinian civilians as human shields is consistently used to justify the Israeli bombing of civilian targets as mentioned above. The bombing of an ambulance carrying wounded for evacuation at the Egyptian Rafah border was justified by the Israeli claim that Hamas fighters were on board. Claims that are never substantiated or investigated.

    In my experience in both Gaza during Israeli aggression 2012 and in Syria on various frontlines - it is normal for the injured or civilian evacuees to be escorted for their safety by military, in Syria by the Syrian Arab Army. I do not know if this was the case in Gaza but it is a legitimate reason for military escort. The civilian bodies that were brought from the ambulance into hospital however contradict Israeli claims. Israel has, so far, failed to provide evidence of its claims that resulted in the deaths of civilians including children.

    Gaza is a strip of land 40km by 12km. It is a densely populated enclave with buildings arranged in close proximity, schools, hospitals, residential areas all on top of each other. Israel claims that the Palestinian Resistance is using their own families, children and civilians as “human shields” while carpet bombing entire residential areas to allegedly wipe out ‘Hamas’.

    The denials of Hamas using human shields

    2014 - BBC’s Jeremy Bowen wrote for the New Statesman - ‘I saw no evidence of Hamas using Palestinians as human shields’. Bowen described his experience in Gaza:

    I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields. I saw men from Hamas on street corners, keeping an eye on what was happening. They were local people and everyone knew them, even the young boys.

    Also in 2014 a Truthout article was published - ‘Congress utilizes myth of human shields to justify [Israeli] war crimes’

    According to the report ‘no Gaza eyewitness found evidence of Hamas using human shields’ during the 2014 Israeli aggression against the Gaza strip which followed a similar pattern to the ongoing 2023 mass bombing of civilian infrastructure - a war crime in itself. From the report:

    Human Rights Watch cited evidence of Israel “blatantly violating the laws of war designed to spare civilians,” including attacks on heavily-populated neighborhoods and shooting at fleeing civilians. Similarly, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem challenged its government’s claims that they had “no intention of harming civilians,” noting how after “weeks of lethal bombardments by Israel in the Gaza Strip which have killed hundreds of civilians and wiped out dozens of families, this claim has become meaningless.” United Nations officials in the Gaza Strip also charged Israeli forces with engaging in serious violations of international law, following a series of attacks against six UN schools where Palestinians were seeking refuge, and where no Hamas weaponry or fighters were present, killing 46 civilians.

    None of the claims by the US State Department or individual Representatives that Hamas used civilians as human shields have been evidenced according to the Truthout report.

    Again in 2014 the Belfast Telegraph correspondent, Kem Sengupta, based in Khan Younis, southern Gaza reported on the ‘myth of Hamas’ human shields’ - Gazans deny being put in the line of fire. Sengupta writes:

    What used to be a three-storey house had been turned into debris sunk into a deep crater with twisted steel rods jutting out. Twenty-six people were killed in the mostly deadly air-strike so far in this bloody conflict. Twenty-four of them were from one family, the Abu Jamaa.

    Around the same time that attack was taking place on Sunday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu was charging Hamas on TV with using “human shields” to gather “telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause”.

    Amnesty International, following an extensive investigation after the 2014 war, found no evidence that “Palestinian civilians have been intentionally used by Hamas or Palestinian armed groups during the current hostilities to ‘shield’ specific locations or military personnel or equipment from Israeli attacks.”

    In 2018 the Independent ran a headline - ‘Israeli army edits video of Palestinian medic its troops shot dead to misleadingly show she was 'human shield for Hamas'

    The edited clip was condemned by Palestinians and rights activists as attempt to ‘justify’ 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar’s death - an IOF sniper shot her in the chest during protests on the Gaza-Israel border on 1st June 2018 as she attended to wounded and unarmed protestors also targeted by IOF snipers.

    Israeli government and military officials tweeted out a video labelled ‘Hamas use of human shields must stop’ showing an excerpt of an interview with Al Najjar. The reality is that the young nurse does not mention Hamas and states clearly that she was there to save the wounded at the front lines.

    “The IDF always accuses Palestinians and Israeli human rights orgs of editing documentation of it human rights abuses. But it edited this video of Razan al Najjar to discredit her after murdering her. Absolutely despicable and hypocritical,” Israeli-American writer Mairav Zonszein said on Twitter.

    From personal experience, Hamas officials have always been very against civilians protesting at the border areas because of the high risk of injury and sniping by the IOF.

    In 2013 I went with protestors to Beit Hanoun, north-east Gaza, to confront the IOF prison guards who encircle the Gaza strip with apartheid walls and barbed wire - converting the enclave into an open air concentration camp.

    The automatic gun turrets that are found along the walls are set to fire at a varying distance. Israel changes the distance without ever informing Gazan farmers -so one day the safe distance is 4 meters, some days it is 6 meters - when farmers cross the red line, they are fired upon by the automatic machine gun turrets.

    We stood on high ground next to the wall. We could see the IOF vehicles and guns trained on us. After about an hour of protests, Hamas cars arrived and asked us to leave the area for our own safety.

    Razan Al Najjar was shot in the chest deliberately by the IOF. She presented no danger to the IOF. She was attending to the wounded during the Great March of Return that began in March 2018. The peaceful march demanded the end of the blockade on Gaza and the right to return for Palestinian refugees.

    The IOF responded to these unarmed civilian demonstrations with the use of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. ‘Among the casualties of the first year are 227 UNRWA students who were injured and 13 who were killed.’

    Watch this video - Great March of Return, a mother’s perspective:



    6 months after the start of the Great March protests, Amnesty International reported:

    According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, since the start of the protests, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition. According to Israeli media, one soldier was moderately injured due to shrapnel from a grenade thrown by a Palestinian from inside Gaza and one Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinian sniper fire near the fence that separates Gaza and Israel outside of the context of the protests.

    Legitimate calls for Israeli authorities to lift their 11-year illegal blockade on Gaza and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their villages and towns have not been met.

    The claim that Al Najjar was a Hamas human shield is a cynical ploy by the Zionist forces to provide justification for their targeting of unarmed civilians who have a legally justified cause to protest under international law. Those that so often call for Palestinians to protest peacefully should understand that there is no effective ‘peaceful’ protest against the IOF.

    In 2021 Law4Palestine - ‘Under Scrutiny: Allegations of Use of Human Shields by Palestinian Armed Groups and the International Criminal Court Investigation’

    What is certain, so far, is that the allegation that the armed groups are using human shields is unsubstantiated, and even the Prosecutor’s Office does not seem to have evidence on this regard, because the evidence at our disposal is the same as that which was available to the Prosecutor’s Office at this stage of the investigation.

    Israel will try to defend itself – whether through the Court or through its political discourse – regarding the commission of war crimes by claiming that the PAGs are terrorist groups and that the war on Gaza was a war on terror where terrorists do not shy away from using civilians as human shields. However, it will face obstacles relating to the characteristics of the Palestinian situation in the Gaza strip and the possibilities of taking “all the possible limits of necessary measures and precautions” to protect civilians and spare them from military attacks.

    Detailed investigations following the 2008-2009 and 2014 conflicts by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and others have failed to find a single documented case of any civilian deaths caused by Hamas using human shields.

    Not one.

    The following video by journalist Abby Martin demonstrates the hypocrisy of ‘human shield’ claims by Washington and Tel-Aviv:

    Now let’s look at Israel’s proven use of Palestinian children and civilians as human shields

    So not only is the Palestinian use of human shields a myth lacking any evidence, it is in fact Israel who is infamous for using human shields in its oppression of the Palestinians. Examples of this are incredibly easy to find even with the most rudimentary of research. Like much Israeli propaganda, it seeks to turn reality upside down and accuse the Palestinians of the crimes that Israel so often commits. This is a prime example of baseless dehumanization that many eagerly embrace because they have come to internalize a demonized image of Palestinians based on Israeli propaganda.

    Decolonize Palestine

    The evidence of Israel using Palestinians as human shields is voluminous, I will cite a number of cases and then offer links to additional reports.

    May 2023 in Ramallah - a report by Defence for Children (DCI) claims that Israeli forces have used at least five Palestinian children as human shields so far this year, including two toddlers.

    Israeli forces then threatened his sons Nidal, 9, and Karam, 11, in addition to his twin nephews, Ahmad and Mohammad, both two years old, and forced them to stand in front of Israeli military vehicles while Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and live ammunition at Palestinians confronting the group of soldiers.

    Israeli special forces forced Anas to stand and walk in front of them for several minutes while handcuffed as they confronted two Palestinian men and fired live ammunition. Before killing the two Palestinian men, Israeli forces forced Anas to sit on the floor of a house next door, blindfolded.

    “International law is explicit and absolutely prohibits the use of children as human shields by armed forces or armed groups," said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “Israeli forces intentionally putting a child in grave danger in order to shield themselves constitutes a war crime.”

    While Israeli forces used the Shalloun family as human shields in Aqbat Jabr refugee camp, one soldier ordered mother Samia to put her two-year-old nephew Mohammad on the ground and raise her hands. Mohammad cried as an Israeli military dog approached him, and as Samia lowered her hands to move him away from the dog, the Israeli soldier put his gun to Mohammad’s head, saying, “Move again and I’ll shoot him.”

    Since 2000, DCIP has documented at least 31 cases involving Palestinian children being used as human shields by the Israeli army. Last year, Israeli soldiers forced 16-year-old Ahed Mohammad Rida Mereb to stand in front of an Israeli military vehicle in Jenin as armed Palestinians fired heavily in their direction.

    A 2013 report by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child describes a litany of abuses of children by the IOF and security forces including their use as human shields:

    Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted.

    Further details of this case can be found in this Guardian report.

    Two Israeli soldiers who used a nine-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield were given suspended sentences and demoted after being convicted of "inappropriate conduct".

    The unnamed soldiers, from the Givati Brigade, ordered Majeh Rabah, from the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City, to check bags for explosives in January 2009, towards the end of Israel's three-week offensive.

    Also in the report from Human Rights Watch.

    2014 - a report from ReliefWeb based on the original report by DCI Palestine:

    Ramallah, August 21, 2014—Israeli soldiers repeatedly used Ahmad Abu Raida, 17, as a human shield for five days while he was held hostage during Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

    Ahmad, from Khuza'a, near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, was just 16 years old when he was taken from his family on July 23. He was forced at gunpoint to search for tunnels for five days, during which time he was interrogated, verbally and physically abused, and deprived of food and sleep. Ahmad told DCI-Palestine in a sworn testimony that Israeli soldiers attempted both to extract information from him regarding Hamas members, and recruit him as an informant, before releasing him on July 27.

    "The Israeli military has consistently accused Hamas of using civilians - particularly children - as human shields, but this incident represents a clear case of their soldiers forcing a child to directly assist in military operations," said Rifat Kassis, executive director of DCI-Palestine. "Israeli officials make generalized accusations while Israeli soldiers engage in conduct that amounts to war crimes."

    A report in Mondoweiss at the same time records accounts of Israeli forces using civilians as human shields:

    Ayman Abu Toaimah, 32, a resident of Khuza’a recalls, “As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields. When the Israeli army arrested people and then released some of them, they were told they are free to go back to the village, but as they were fleeing they came under fire and some of them shot dead. These people were used as human shields.”

    Abu Saleem, 56, a resident of Khuza’a echoed Abu Toaimah, “Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields– how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It’s them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza’a and Shuja’iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses. They attacked innocent civilians with their bombs, and missiles, they attacked chicken farms, they burned our crops, they have no mercy.”

    May 2022 a Palestinian teenage girl was used by the IOF as a human shield during a military raid in Jenin:

    According to DCIP, during a raid on the morning of May 13th, Israeli soldiers forced 16-year-old Ahed Mohammad Rida Mereb, to stand in front of an Israeli military vehicle for two hours as the vehicle came under fire from Palestinian gunmen, while Israeli soldiers sat inside the vehicle.

    Breaking the Silence documents abuses of Palestinians by the IOF based on accounts from former IOF soldiers. A ‘moving human shield’ is one such report:

    Apparently, that captain had gone to Takua, which is a pretty hostile village—they were throwing stones at the jeep. So he just stopped a Palestinian guy who was passing, forty-something years old, and tied him to the hood of the jeep, a guy just lying on the hood, and they drove into the village. No one threw any more rocks. A human shield. Yes. But not just a human shield—first of all, a human shield is bad enough—this was a moving human shield. Tied to the hood of the jeep and they drove with him tied there. Drove with him through the village, it’s horrific.


    22nd April 2004, a 13 year old boy called Mohammed Said Essa Badwan/Badran was used as a human shield. Mohammed was peacefully taking part in spontaneous demonstration in Biddo against the building of the Annexation Wall. Around noon, following the launch of sound bombs and teargas canisters by the soldiers, some nearby youth started throwing stones. At this point, two Israeli Border Guards arrested Mohammed, beat him and forced him to sit on the hood of their jeep, tying his arm to the windshield screen and then using him as a human shield.

    Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who heads the organisation Rabbis for Human Rights, was present and tried to intervene for the release of the child but was instead arrested and beaten. Mohammed was reported to have been repeatedly hit by the soldiers while he was tied to the vehicle. Although he begged them to release him because he was scared and in pain, they would not. He also reportedly suffered from exposure to the teargas used by the soldiers, since he could not move nor was he given any protection. After about four hours, Mohammed was untied, forced into the jeep and taken first to Al-Sahl, an area in which the Annexation Wall is being constructed. He was then questioned by a military officer. Finally the child was released in the neighbouring village of Al-Kalaileh where he had to wait, alone and in the dark, for a relative to come and pick him up.

    Ramallah June 4th 2013 - ‘Israeli soldiers proudly paraded the handcuffed teen up and down the street, making a public spectacle of him in the occupied West Bank town of Abu Dis.’

    Armed with live ammunition, rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas, on Friday, April 19, at least 10 Israeli soldiers confronted the crowd of protesters using 17-year-old Muhammad Rabea as a human shield. They forced him to walk at gunpoint with his hands raised in the air as they approached the protesters.

    Prior to being abused as a human shield, Muhammad had been savagely beaten by the IOF forces that had grabbed him from the streets. He was hit on the forehead with a rifle stock, kicked repeatedly on the legs, hit at the base of his neck by steel helmets. He was bundled in the back of the military jeep, verbally and physically abused, his hands tied by plastic cords. He was forced to sit in a revolving chair while IOF soldiers kicked him as the chair spun in the back of the jeep.

    “One of the soldiers sprayed the keffiyeh (scarf) I was wearing with pepper spray before tying it tightly over my eyes, burning them,” he says. “Each time I coughed, he told me to shut up and kicked me. I wasn’t allowed to cough.”

    At the military camp, soldiers forced him to stand facing a metal pole. Muhammad said the soldiers ripped his jacket and searched him, while an army dog clawed his back and calves. Following the search, soldiers knocked him down on the ground where he laid for two hours in pain as they continued to kick him in his legs, back and stomach. One of the soldiers removed the keffiyeh over his eyes and poured gasoline on it, burning it in front of him. The soldiers re-blindfolded him with a black piece of cloth and continued to hit him on the head with their helmets.

    Btselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) 2017:

    Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers.

    Using civilians to get wanted persons out of a house is known as “neighbor procedure.” This procedure does not differ significantly from other ways in which the military has used Palestinian civilian. It, too, too, constitutes illegal exploitation of civilians to perform military tasks and places them in real danger. This was made irrefutably clear in an incident that took place in 2002. On 14 August, soldiers sent Nidal Abu Mukhsan, a 19-year-old from the village of Tubas, to the home of Nasser Jarar, a Hamas activist, and ordered him to get Jarar out of the house. When Abu Mukhsan approached the house, Jarar, apparently thinking that the person knocking at the door was a soldier, shot and killed him.

    2012 report from the Institute for Middle East Understanding:

    In 2007, B'Tselem releases a report documenting 14 cases in which Israeli soldiers have used Palestinian civilians - including boys and girls as young as 11-years-old - as human shields to protect themselves in dangerous situations. In one case, a 14-year-old girl in Gaza is shot in the stomach and leg after soldiers used her as a human shield during an incursion.

    In May 2011, two dozen former Israeli soldiers come forward to provide eyewitness accounts of the abuse of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, including their use as human shields.

    2021 - Human Rights Watch - A Threshold Crossed, Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution.

    When Palestinians Became Human Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and the Great Revolt (1936–1939) - Cambridge University Press

    Using Palestinians as human shields began under the British Mandate in Palestine that ended in 1947. In frustration at the relative success of Palestinian rebels who rejected the influx of European Jews to dispossess Palestinians of their land, the British turned to the use of human shields to defuse Palestinian guerilla military campaigns from 1936-38.

    The regularization of human shielding served as proof of “the dark path of repression” foreseen and warned against by the Peel Commission. Footnote125 It was also elemental to an ongoing process of colonial racialization that robbed the Palestinians of their humanity, stripped them of any figment of legal rights or protections, and denuded them of the most basic security of life. Indeed, with the systematic use of human shields, the colonial regime veered towards the “negation of all law” so feared by top civilian officials and took Palestinian society with it into the ensuing abyss.

    Conclusions

    US law requires Biden to impose sanctions on Hamas for using human shields.

    The Hill

    According to a report in The Hill, the “Sanctioning the Use of Civilians as Defenseless Shields Act” passed both houses of Congress unanimously in 2018. The Shields Act, as it is known, specifically requires the president to submit to Congress a list of persons he determines to be involved in the use of human shields.

    Biden should move swiftly to impose the sanctions already required by his determination that Hamas is using human shields.

    There is no evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields - there is a plethora of evidence that Israel has historically exploited Palestinians as human shields putting the lives of children at risk on multiple occasions, torturing and traumatising them in the process. This is completely ignored by Washington. No sanctions on Israel?

    It can be argued that Israel has deliberately put its own civilians in danger as human shields by facilitating settlement in contested zones beyond the green line - as for example in the case of the Kibbutz Be’eri when it is now proven that Israeli civilians were not only killed by the IOF gunfire during battles with Palestinian Resistance factions but were also shelled by Israeli tanks two days after the 7th October when the IOF took a decision to eliminate their own civilians alongside Resistance militants.

    They [Israelis] are directly put in danger as a sacrifice to Israel’s expansionist colonial designs, which they can then blame on Palestinians to further accelerate this same project.

    Decolonize Palestine

    ‘Israel justifies its violent attacks by continuously accusing Hamas of using human shields, desperately hoping to stir moral indignation while also trying to muster a legal defence for the indefensible.’

    The subtext is that civilised people protect their children while Palestinians sacrifice them.

    Under this pretext all Palestinians become legitimate targets and Israel can be exonerated of all blame. It is a criminal manipulation of reality to enable justification of genocide and the US and UK are upholding it - thus they are complicit in genocide.

    The director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned on Tuesday, writing:

    “As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.

    “This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”

    See full letter, news report and interview from Wednesday morning with Mokhiber.


    Journalist Sam Husseini wrote on X - I asked the State Dept on Tuesday about the recent DAWN MENA report documenting the Biden administration's efforts to pay for Israeli plans to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians to Gaza. The spokesperson refused to comment on the funding request:

    If you really want to understand Washington’s defence of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses including a de facto genocide of the Palestinian people, you need look no further than this extraordinary admission by Robert F. Kennedy Jr:

    Palestinian life is expendable if it ensures US unipolar supremacy. Heck, even the lives of Israelis are superfluous when faced with US protection of its global hegemony. If it is not yet clear that tropes such as “Hamas atrocities” and “Hamas human shields” are nothing more than fig leaves for US proxy war crimes in defence of US global military adventurism - then we are headed for a very ominous future.

    Thank you for reading.

    ***

    Please do consider subscribing to my substack. Every little amount does help me to keep pushing back against the lies that threaten us all.
    The 'Hamas human shield' justification for Israeli war crimes Zionist projection is the default Hasbara strategy vanessa beeley What separates Israel, the United States and other democracies when it comes to incredibly difficult situations like this is our respect for international law and, as appropriate, the laws of war. We do everything we can, in these situations, to avoid civilian casualties. That is in direct contrast with Hamas which uses people as human shields. It [Hamas] actually seeks to put Palestinian civilians in situations where they could be harmed. This is very much part of the game plan. We know Israel will take all the precautions it can, just as we would, again that is what separates us from Hamas and terrorist groups that engage in the most heinous kind of activities US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken If you actually listen to the clip of Blinken justifying Israeli brutality you will hear how he stumbles over his words. He knows he is lying in my opinion. The 4000 plus dead children, 10,328 dead civilians, 26000 injured and 2300 missing believed buried under the rubble of Israeli bombs does not substantiate Blinken’s claims of adherence to international law. The Israeli bombing of humanitarian convoys, ambulances, paramedics, Civil Defence headquarters, journalists - 50 killed so far, hospitals, makeshift refugee centres, places of worship - mosques and churches, schools, UNWRA facilities, humanitarian aid supplies including essential bottled water supplies, sewage treatment plants, bridges, solar panels, electricity and internet, media buildings, fisherman’s boats, flour stores, burning of food crops - all these targets are in direct violation of any rule of war or human rights conventions. The deliberate policy of starvation and the cutting off of water, food, fuel and electricity supplies is a genocidal policy: According to Euro-Med Monitor, the Israeli war of starvation has taken very dangerous turns, including cutting off all food supplies to the Northern half and bombing and destroying factories, bakeries, food stores, water stations, and tanks throughout the entire enclave. Soaring malnutrition cases especially among pregnant women and children. A Euromed report confirms that “women and children in Gaza are disproportionately suffering from the effects of Israel's war. Approximately 52,500 infants in Gaza are currently at risk of starvation, death, dehydration, and other health hazards due to overcrowding, in addition to 55,000 pregnant women, of whom 5,500 are expected to give birth this month.” “According to Euro-Med Monitor, getting bread in the Gaza Strip has become an existential challenge, since Gaza’s sole mill there is still unable to grind wheat because of a shortage of fuel and electricity. Since October 7, 11 bakeries have been bombed and destroyed, while the ones that are still operating face tremendous difficulties due to fuel and flour shortages.” Israel has been blatant about its genocidal policies. Blinken disappears the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza in his statement. Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, has not only described the bombing of Gaza as “amazing”, he has recommended nuking Gaza and sending Palestinians to Ireland or the desert. According to a Times of Israel article: Eliyahu also voices his objection during the interview to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and charging that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.” “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.” He says the northern Strip has no right to exist, adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.” Corpses rotting under rubble, shallow and hastily dug mass graves. Chemicals believed to be used by Israel in the bombing campaigns including White Phosphorous - all these factors spell disaster when the rains come. Gaza is a strip of land the size of the Isle of Wight ( 40km X 12km) with a population of 2.2 million civilians. With the forced evacuation by Israel from the north to the south - you will have 2.2 million civilians living in an area half its original size. Israel has destroyed Gaza’s ability to desalinate water to provide clean drinking water or to effectively pump sewage out of the strip. When the rains come, disease will be rife with sewage, decaying bodies, chemicals, disease flooding the enclave. Even in so-called peace time children are used to wading through sewage to get to school. Children are forced to swim in raw sewage in the sea off the Gaza coast. This pollution will be exponentially increased by the latest Israeli aggression. Added to this, the targeting of hospitals and health centers will result in chronic illness patients dying from lack of available treatment. Euromed - “more than 2,000 cancer patients, more than 1,000 patients in need of dialysis to survive, 50,000 cardiovascular patients, and over 60,000 diabetics—urgently need access to basic healthcare services considering the severe shortage of medications, medical supplies, fuel, food, and clean water.” These patients are not given priority because of the massive influx of emergency cases from the Israeli bombing raids. As Euromed Monitor reports: Eighteen out of 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped operating so far, according to local health officials there. Overall, 120 health institutions have been targeted, while more than 48 primary care centres (70%) are now out of service due to the ongoing Israeli raids and the fuel crisis. The Hamas Human Shield trope The claim that Hamas or as I prefer to call it, the Palestinian Resistance coalition, use Palestinian civilians as human shields is consistently used to justify the Israeli bombing of civilian targets as mentioned above. The bombing of an ambulance carrying wounded for evacuation at the Egyptian Rafah border was justified by the Israeli claim that Hamas fighters were on board. Claims that are never substantiated or investigated. In my experience in both Gaza during Israeli aggression 2012 and in Syria on various frontlines - it is normal for the injured or civilian evacuees to be escorted for their safety by military, in Syria by the Syrian Arab Army. I do not know if this was the case in Gaza but it is a legitimate reason for military escort. The civilian bodies that were brought from the ambulance into hospital however contradict Israeli claims. Israel has, so far, failed to provide evidence of its claims that resulted in the deaths of civilians including children. Gaza is a strip of land 40km by 12km. It is a densely populated enclave with buildings arranged in close proximity, schools, hospitals, residential areas all on top of each other. Israel claims that the Palestinian Resistance is using their own families, children and civilians as “human shields” while carpet bombing entire residential areas to allegedly wipe out ‘Hamas’. The denials of Hamas using human shields 2014 - BBC’s Jeremy Bowen wrote for the New Statesman - ‘I saw no evidence of Hamas using Palestinians as human shields’. Bowen described his experience in Gaza: I saw no evidence during my week in Gaza of Israel’s accusation that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields. I saw men from Hamas on street corners, keeping an eye on what was happening. They were local people and everyone knew them, even the young boys. Also in 2014 a Truthout article was published - ‘Congress utilizes myth of human shields to justify [Israeli] war crimes’ According to the report ‘no Gaza eyewitness found evidence of Hamas using human shields’ during the 2014 Israeli aggression against the Gaza strip which followed a similar pattern to the ongoing 2023 mass bombing of civilian infrastructure - a war crime in itself. From the report: Human Rights Watch cited evidence of Israel “blatantly violating the laws of war designed to spare civilians,” including attacks on heavily-populated neighborhoods and shooting at fleeing civilians. Similarly, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem challenged its government’s claims that they had “no intention of harming civilians,” noting how after “weeks of lethal bombardments by Israel in the Gaza Strip which have killed hundreds of civilians and wiped out dozens of families, this claim has become meaningless.” United Nations officials in the Gaza Strip also charged Israeli forces with engaging in serious violations of international law, following a series of attacks against six UN schools where Palestinians were seeking refuge, and where no Hamas weaponry or fighters were present, killing 46 civilians. None of the claims by the US State Department or individual Representatives that Hamas used civilians as human shields have been evidenced according to the Truthout report. Again in 2014 the Belfast Telegraph correspondent, Kem Sengupta, based in Khan Younis, southern Gaza reported on the ‘myth of Hamas’ human shields’ - Gazans deny being put in the line of fire. Sengupta writes: What used to be a three-storey house had been turned into debris sunk into a deep crater with twisted steel rods jutting out. Twenty-six people were killed in the mostly deadly air-strike so far in this bloody conflict. Twenty-four of them were from one family, the Abu Jamaa. Around the same time that attack was taking place on Sunday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu was charging Hamas on TV with using “human shields” to gather “telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause”. Amnesty International, following an extensive investigation after the 2014 war, found no evidence that “Palestinian civilians have been intentionally used by Hamas or Palestinian armed groups during the current hostilities to ‘shield’ specific locations or military personnel or equipment from Israeli attacks.” In 2018 the Independent ran a headline - ‘Israeli army edits video of Palestinian medic its troops shot dead to misleadingly show she was 'human shield for Hamas' The edited clip was condemned by Palestinians and rights activists as attempt to ‘justify’ 21-year-old Razan al-Najjar’s death - an IOF sniper shot her in the chest during protests on the Gaza-Israel border on 1st June 2018 as she attended to wounded and unarmed protestors also targeted by IOF snipers. Israeli government and military officials tweeted out a video labelled ‘Hamas use of human shields must stop’ showing an excerpt of an interview with Al Najjar. The reality is that the young nurse does not mention Hamas and states clearly that she was there to save the wounded at the front lines. “The IDF always accuses Palestinians and Israeli human rights orgs of editing documentation of it human rights abuses. But it edited this video of Razan al Najjar to discredit her after murdering her. Absolutely despicable and hypocritical,” Israeli-American writer Mairav Zonszein said on Twitter. From personal experience, Hamas officials have always been very against civilians protesting at the border areas because of the high risk of injury and sniping by the IOF. In 2013 I went with protestors to Beit Hanoun, north-east Gaza, to confront the IOF prison guards who encircle the Gaza strip with apartheid walls and barbed wire - converting the enclave into an open air concentration camp. The automatic gun turrets that are found along the walls are set to fire at a varying distance. Israel changes the distance without ever informing Gazan farmers -so one day the safe distance is 4 meters, some days it is 6 meters - when farmers cross the red line, they are fired upon by the automatic machine gun turrets. We stood on high ground next to the wall. We could see the IOF vehicles and guns trained on us. After about an hour of protests, Hamas cars arrived and asked us to leave the area for our own safety. Razan Al Najjar was shot in the chest deliberately by the IOF. She presented no danger to the IOF. She was attending to the wounded during the Great March of Return that began in March 2018. The peaceful march demanded the end of the blockade on Gaza and the right to return for Palestinian refugees. The IOF responded to these unarmed civilian demonstrations with the use of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition. ‘Among the casualties of the first year are 227 UNRWA students who were injured and 13 who were killed.’ Watch this video - Great March of Return, a mother’s perspective: 6 months after the start of the Great March protests, Amnesty International reported: According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, since the start of the protests, over 150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000 others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live ammunition. According to Israeli media, one soldier was moderately injured due to shrapnel from a grenade thrown by a Palestinian from inside Gaza and one Israeli soldier was killed by Palestinian sniper fire near the fence that separates Gaza and Israel outside of the context of the protests. Legitimate calls for Israeli authorities to lift their 11-year illegal blockade on Gaza and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their villages and towns have not been met. The claim that Al Najjar was a Hamas human shield is a cynical ploy by the Zionist forces to provide justification for their targeting of unarmed civilians who have a legally justified cause to protest under international law. Those that so often call for Palestinians to protest peacefully should understand that there is no effective ‘peaceful’ protest against the IOF. In 2021 Law4Palestine - ‘Under Scrutiny: Allegations of Use of Human Shields by Palestinian Armed Groups and the International Criminal Court Investigation’ What is certain, so far, is that the allegation that the armed groups are using human shields is unsubstantiated, and even the Prosecutor’s Office does not seem to have evidence on this regard, because the evidence at our disposal is the same as that which was available to the Prosecutor’s Office at this stage of the investigation. Israel will try to defend itself – whether through the Court or through its political discourse – regarding the commission of war crimes by claiming that the PAGs are terrorist groups and that the war on Gaza was a war on terror where terrorists do not shy away from using civilians as human shields. However, it will face obstacles relating to the characteristics of the Palestinian situation in the Gaza strip and the possibilities of taking “all the possible limits of necessary measures and precautions” to protect civilians and spare them from military attacks. Detailed investigations following the 2008-2009 and 2014 conflicts by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and others have failed to find a single documented case of any civilian deaths caused by Hamas using human shields. Not one. The following video by journalist Abby Martin demonstrates the hypocrisy of ‘human shield’ claims by Washington and Tel-Aviv: Now let’s look at Israel’s proven use of Palestinian children and civilians as human shields So not only is the Palestinian use of human shields a myth lacking any evidence, it is in fact Israel who is infamous for using human shields in its oppression of the Palestinians. Examples of this are incredibly easy to find even with the most rudimentary of research. Like much Israeli propaganda, it seeks to turn reality upside down and accuse the Palestinians of the crimes that Israel so often commits. This is a prime example of baseless dehumanization that many eagerly embrace because they have come to internalize a demonized image of Palestinians based on Israeli propaganda. Decolonize Palestine The evidence of Israel using Palestinians as human shields is voluminous, I will cite a number of cases and then offer links to additional reports. May 2023 in Ramallah - a report by Defence for Children (DCI) claims that Israeli forces have used at least five Palestinian children as human shields so far this year, including two toddlers. Israeli forces then threatened his sons Nidal, 9, and Karam, 11, in addition to his twin nephews, Ahmad and Mohammad, both two years old, and forced them to stand in front of Israeli military vehicles while Israeli forces fired tear gas canisters, stun grenades, and live ammunition at Palestinians confronting the group of soldiers. Israeli special forces forced Anas to stand and walk in front of them for several minutes while handcuffed as they confronted two Palestinian men and fired live ammunition. Before killing the two Palestinian men, Israeli forces forced Anas to sit on the floor of a house next door, blindfolded. “International law is explicit and absolutely prohibits the use of children as human shields by armed forces or armed groups," said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “Israeli forces intentionally putting a child in grave danger in order to shield themselves constitutes a war crime.” While Israeli forces used the Shalloun family as human shields in Aqbat Jabr refugee camp, one soldier ordered mother Samia to put her two-year-old nephew Mohammad on the ground and raise her hands. Mohammad cried as an Israeli military dog approached him, and as Samia lowered her hands to move him away from the dog, the Israeli soldier put his gun to Mohammad’s head, saying, “Move again and I’ll shoot him.” Since 2000, DCIP has documented at least 31 cases involving Palestinian children being used as human shields by the Israeli army. Last year, Israeli soldiers forced 16-year-old Ahed Mohammad Rida Mereb to stand in front of an Israeli military vehicle in Jenin as armed Palestinians fired heavily in their direction. A 2013 report by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child describes a litany of abuses of children by the IOF and security forces including their use as human shields: Almost all those using children as human shields and informants have remained unpunished and the soldiers convicted for having forced at gunpoint a nine-year-old child to search bags suspected of containing explosives only received a suspended sentence of three months and were demoted. Further details of this case can be found in this Guardian report. Two Israeli soldiers who used a nine-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield were given suspended sentences and demoted after being convicted of "inappropriate conduct". The unnamed soldiers, from the Givati Brigade, ordered Majeh Rabah, from the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City, to check bags for explosives in January 2009, towards the end of Israel's three-week offensive. Also in the report from Human Rights Watch. 2014 - a report from ReliefWeb based on the original report by DCI Palestine: Ramallah, August 21, 2014—Israeli soldiers repeatedly used Ahmad Abu Raida, 17, as a human shield for five days while he was held hostage during Israel’s ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. Ahmad, from Khuza'a, near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, was just 16 years old when he was taken from his family on July 23. He was forced at gunpoint to search for tunnels for five days, during which time he was interrogated, verbally and physically abused, and deprived of food and sleep. Ahmad told DCI-Palestine in a sworn testimony that Israeli soldiers attempted both to extract information from him regarding Hamas members, and recruit him as an informant, before releasing him on July 27. "The Israeli military has consistently accused Hamas of using civilians - particularly children - as human shields, but this incident represents a clear case of their soldiers forcing a child to directly assist in military operations," said Rifat Kassis, executive director of DCI-Palestine. "Israeli officials make generalized accusations while Israeli soldiers engage in conduct that amounts to war crimes." A report in Mondoweiss at the same time records accounts of Israeli forces using civilians as human shields: Ayman Abu Toaimah, 32, a resident of Khuza’a recalls, “As Israeli invading troops advanced to the village they besieged it and used residents as human shields. When the Israeli army arrested people and then released some of them, they were told they are free to go back to the village, but as they were fleeing they came under fire and some of them shot dead. These people were used as human shields.” Abu Saleem, 56, a resident of Khuza’a echoed Abu Toaimah, “Israelis claim that Hamas is using us as human shields– how? This is a lie, we do not see fighters in the streets. It’s them, the Israelis who used us as human shields in Khuza’a and Shuja’iyeh. They turned our houses into military posts, terrified residents in the houses. They attacked innocent civilians with their bombs, and missiles, they attacked chicken farms, they burned our crops, they have no mercy.” May 2022 a Palestinian teenage girl was used by the IOF as a human shield during a military raid in Jenin: According to DCIP, during a raid on the morning of May 13th, Israeli soldiers forced 16-year-old Ahed Mohammad Rida Mereb, to stand in front of an Israeli military vehicle for two hours as the vehicle came under fire from Palestinian gunmen, while Israeli soldiers sat inside the vehicle. Breaking the Silence documents abuses of Palestinians by the IOF based on accounts from former IOF soldiers. A ‘moving human shield’ is one such report: Apparently, that captain had gone to Takua, which is a pretty hostile village—they were throwing stones at the jeep. So he just stopped a Palestinian guy who was passing, forty-something years old, and tied him to the hood of the jeep, a guy just lying on the hood, and they drove into the village. No one threw any more rocks. A human shield. Yes. But not just a human shield—first of all, a human shield is bad enough—this was a moving human shield. Tied to the hood of the jeep and they drove with him tied there. Drove with him through the village, it’s horrific. 22nd April 2004, a 13 year old boy called Mohammed Said Essa Badwan/Badran was used as a human shield. Mohammed was peacefully taking part in spontaneous demonstration in Biddo against the building of the Annexation Wall. Around noon, following the launch of sound bombs and teargas canisters by the soldiers, some nearby youth started throwing stones. At this point, two Israeli Border Guards arrested Mohammed, beat him and forced him to sit on the hood of their jeep, tying his arm to the windshield screen and then using him as a human shield. Rabbi Arik Ascherman, who heads the organisation Rabbis for Human Rights, was present and tried to intervene for the release of the child but was instead arrested and beaten. Mohammed was reported to have been repeatedly hit by the soldiers while he was tied to the vehicle. Although he begged them to release him because he was scared and in pain, they would not. He also reportedly suffered from exposure to the teargas used by the soldiers, since he could not move nor was he given any protection. After about four hours, Mohammed was untied, forced into the jeep and taken first to Al-Sahl, an area in which the Annexation Wall is being constructed. He was then questioned by a military officer. Finally the child was released in the neighbouring village of Al-Kalaileh where he had to wait, alone and in the dark, for a relative to come and pick him up. Ramallah June 4th 2013 - ‘Israeli soldiers proudly paraded the handcuffed teen up and down the street, making a public spectacle of him in the occupied West Bank town of Abu Dis.’ Armed with live ammunition, rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas, on Friday, April 19, at least 10 Israeli soldiers confronted the crowd of protesters using 17-year-old Muhammad Rabea as a human shield. They forced him to walk at gunpoint with his hands raised in the air as they approached the protesters. Prior to being abused as a human shield, Muhammad had been savagely beaten by the IOF forces that had grabbed him from the streets. He was hit on the forehead with a rifle stock, kicked repeatedly on the legs, hit at the base of his neck by steel helmets. He was bundled in the back of the military jeep, verbally and physically abused, his hands tied by plastic cords. He was forced to sit in a revolving chair while IOF soldiers kicked him as the chair spun in the back of the jeep. “One of the soldiers sprayed the keffiyeh (scarf) I was wearing with pepper spray before tying it tightly over my eyes, burning them,” he says. “Each time I coughed, he told me to shut up and kicked me. I wasn’t allowed to cough.” At the military camp, soldiers forced him to stand facing a metal pole. Muhammad said the soldiers ripped his jacket and searched him, while an army dog clawed his back and calves. Following the search, soldiers knocked him down on the ground where he laid for two hours in pain as they continued to kick him in his legs, back and stomach. One of the soldiers removed the keffiyeh over his eyes and poured gasoline on it, burning it in front of him. The soldiers re-blindfolded him with a black piece of cloth and continued to hit him on the head with their helmets. Btselem (The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories) 2017: Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, Israeli security forces have repeatedly used Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip as human shields, ordering them to perform military tasks that risked their lives. As part of this policy, soldiers have ordered Palestinian civilians to remove suspicious objects from roads, to tell people to come out of their homes so the military can arrest them, to stand in front of soldiers while the latter shoot from behind them, and more. The Palestinian civilians were chosen at random for these tasks, and could not refuse the demand placed on them by armed soldiers. Using civilians to get wanted persons out of a house is known as “neighbor procedure.” This procedure does not differ significantly from other ways in which the military has used Palestinian civilian. It, too, too, constitutes illegal exploitation of civilians to perform military tasks and places them in real danger. This was made irrefutably clear in an incident that took place in 2002. On 14 August, soldiers sent Nidal Abu Mukhsan, a 19-year-old from the village of Tubas, to the home of Nasser Jarar, a Hamas activist, and ordered him to get Jarar out of the house. When Abu Mukhsan approached the house, Jarar, apparently thinking that the person knocking at the door was a soldier, shot and killed him. 2012 report from the Institute for Middle East Understanding: In 2007, B'Tselem releases a report documenting 14 cases in which Israeli soldiers have used Palestinian civilians - including boys and girls as young as 11-years-old - as human shields to protect themselves in dangerous situations. In one case, a 14-year-old girl in Gaza is shot in the stomach and leg after soldiers used her as a human shield during an incursion. In May 2011, two dozen former Israeli soldiers come forward to provide eyewitness accounts of the abuse of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, including their use as human shields. 2021 - Human Rights Watch - A Threshold Crossed, Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. When Palestinians Became Human Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization, and the Great Revolt (1936–1939) - Cambridge University Press Using Palestinians as human shields began under the British Mandate in Palestine that ended in 1947. In frustration at the relative success of Palestinian rebels who rejected the influx of European Jews to dispossess Palestinians of their land, the British turned to the use of human shields to defuse Palestinian guerilla military campaigns from 1936-38. The regularization of human shielding served as proof of “the dark path of repression” foreseen and warned against by the Peel Commission. Footnote125 It was also elemental to an ongoing process of colonial racialization that robbed the Palestinians of their humanity, stripped them of any figment of legal rights or protections, and denuded them of the most basic security of life. Indeed, with the systematic use of human shields, the colonial regime veered towards the “negation of all law” so feared by top civilian officials and took Palestinian society with it into the ensuing abyss. Conclusions US law requires Biden to impose sanctions on Hamas for using human shields. The Hill According to a report in The Hill, the “Sanctioning the Use of Civilians as Defenseless Shields Act” passed both houses of Congress unanimously in 2018. The Shields Act, as it is known, specifically requires the president to submit to Congress a list of persons he determines to be involved in the use of human shields. Biden should move swiftly to impose the sanctions already required by his determination that Hamas is using human shields. There is no evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields - there is a plethora of evidence that Israel has historically exploited Palestinians as human shields putting the lives of children at risk on multiple occasions, torturing and traumatising them in the process. This is completely ignored by Washington. No sanctions on Israel? It can be argued that Israel has deliberately put its own civilians in danger as human shields by facilitating settlement in contested zones beyond the green line - as for example in the case of the Kibbutz Be’eri when it is now proven that Israeli civilians were not only killed by the IOF gunfire during battles with Palestinian Resistance factions but were also shelled by Israeli tanks two days after the 7th October when the IOF took a decision to eliminate their own civilians alongside Resistance militants. They [Israelis] are directly put in danger as a sacrifice to Israel’s expansionist colonial designs, which they can then blame on Palestinians to further accelerate this same project. Decolonize Palestine ‘Israel justifies its violent attacks by continuously accusing Hamas of using human shields, desperately hoping to stir moral indignation while also trying to muster a legal defence for the indefensible.’ The subtext is that civilised people protect their children while Palestinians sacrifice them. Under this pretext all Palestinians become legitimate targets and Israel can be exonerated of all blame. It is a criminal manipulation of reality to enable justification of genocide and the US and UK are upholding it - thus they are complicit in genocide. The director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned on Tuesday, writing: “As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules. “This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.” See full letter, news report and interview from Wednesday morning with Mokhiber. Journalist Sam Husseini wrote on X - I asked the State Dept on Tuesday about the recent DAWN MENA report documenting the Biden administration's efforts to pay for Israeli plans to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians to Gaza. The spokesperson refused to comment on the funding request: If you really want to understand Washington’s defence of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses including a de facto genocide of the Palestinian people, you need look no further than this extraordinary admission by Robert F. Kennedy Jr: Palestinian life is expendable if it ensures US unipolar supremacy. Heck, even the lives of Israelis are superfluous when faced with US protection of its global hegemony. If it is not yet clear that tropes such as “Hamas atrocities” and “Hamas human shields” are nothing more than fig leaves for US proxy war crimes in defence of US global military adventurism - then we are headed for a very ominous future. Thank you for reading. *** Please do consider subscribing to my substack. Every little amount does help me to keep pushing back against the lies that threaten us all.
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