Israel escalates fighting with Lebanon, as ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues

Thomas Scripps

Heavy fire was exchanged across the Israel-Lebanon border over the weekend and into Monday as the Netanyahu government presses for a wider war in the region.

In an article titled “Creeping escalation along Israel-Lebanon border brings risk of bigger war,” the Washington Post notes:

“Saturday saw Israeli jets strike an aluminum factory in the Lebanese town of Nabatieh, 12 miles north of the border—well beyond the traditional zone in which retaliatory fire has been considered acceptable by both sides.”

The article notes that “both sides have started using deadlier weapons,” with Israel “now regularly sending fighter jets to strike Hezbollah targets; Hezbollah is deploying drones and heavier caliber missiles.”

Last week, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari threatened, “Lebanon’s citizens will bear the cost of this recklessness and of Hezbollah’s decision to be the defender of Hamas-ISIS. … The IDF has operational plans for changing the security situation in the north.”

On Monday morning, Israel carried out another round of provocative shelling. Hezbollah returned fire against Arab al-Aramshe and Bar’am, as well as the Biranit army base. No injuries were suffered, though heavy damage was caused to the barracks.

Further exchanges of fire followed between IDF artillery, helicopters, fighter jets and tanks and Hezbollah missiles and drones.

Since October 7, nearly 100 have been killed in Lebanon, including 74 members of Hezbollah, and nine in Israel, including six IDF soldiers.

On Friday, Britain’s leading foreign policy think tank Chatham House published, “The closer Israel gets to destroying Hamas, the more likely war with Hezbollah becomes.” It noted, “There are those in the Israeli government, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who want to more aggressively punish Hezbollah for its shelling of Israeli military positions along the border.”

Gallant is leading the charge, telling US Secretary of State Antony Blinken of his desire to strike Hezbollah pre-emptively, which has until this point been overruled by his colleagues in Israel’s war cabinet. But his view is widespread among senior officers, who “believe that a war in the north is inevitable.”

Admitting Israel’s plans for a wider war, Gallant said Sunday, “Iran is the root of hostility and aggression against the State of Israel. The war is multifront…

“In recent days, the defense establishment has identified a growing trend of Iran working to intensify attacks by the militias against Israel through its proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. We are following and will know how to act at the appropriate time, place and strength.”

Yemen is another potential flashpoint for the eruption of a regional war. On Sunday, Iran-aligned Houthi fighters seized a cargo ship off the country’s south coast. Spokesman Yahya Sare’e announced the vessel had been targeted for “being Israeli-owned,” which it reportedly is not. Houthi forces have said they will “not hesitate to target any Israeli vessel in the Red Sea or any place we can reach.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu provocatively condemned the “Iranian” attack, while the United States National Security Council condemned the “flagrant violation of international law” and threatened to take “the appropriate next steps” with its allies.

The US already has substantial naval forces in the region and claims to have twice intercepted Houthi missiles and drones bound for Israel.

While the scope of the war expands, Israel is continuing its massacre and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. The latest figures released by the Health Ministry show 13,300 have been killed, including close to 5,600 children and 3,550 women.

Attacks on hospitals, schools and refugee camps are continuous, with Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud commenting these strikes “seem to be a trend right now.” According to the UN, 176 people have been killed and 800 wounded while sheltering in its school buildings since October 7.

The latest focus is the Indonesian Hospital in the far north of Gaza. Shelling Sunday night through Monday morning killed 12 people, including patients, and injured scores. The Health Ministry warned that hundreds of civilian lives, including patients and medical staff, “are at the risk of death as a result of the direct and repeated bombardment of the Indonesian Hospital.” Tanks have surrounded the facility, and bomb damage to electricity generators has already caused one power outage.

More airstrikes were also carried out against the Jabaliya and Nuseirat refugee camps.

Preparations are being made to visit the same level of death and destruction on southern Gaza as has already devastated Gaza City and its surroundings in the north. Last week, the IDF told residents of the southern city of Khan Younis—the largest in southern Gaza—to leave. Roughly 1 million people are currently sheltering there having fled the north, nearly five times the city’s usual population.

Strikes have already been launched against the southern strip—roughly a third of all Palestinian deaths have been in this region—but are now set to escalate. Former head of Israel’s national security council Giora Eiland told Reuters of the planned operations, “There will probably be more civilian casualties. It is not going to deter us from moving forward.”

On Monday morning, Israeli airstrikes killed dozens in Hamad, northwest of Khan Yunis, most of them women and children. Separate IDF raids were carried out on the town of Bani Suhaila, east of the city.

Two-thirds of Gaza’s population is already displaced. As vast numbers of people are crowded into ever smaller spaces in the Gaza Strip, humanitarian conditions are getting even worse. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, 90 percent of children are suffering health issues like malnutrition, anemia and weakened immunity. The organisation reported that the IDF has attacked agricultural land and facilities, flour silos, fishing boats and UN relief centres.

Not one bakery has been functional since November 7, with 11 destroyed and the others lacking flour, fuel and electricity.

According to the UN, 44,000 cases of diarrhoea and 70,000 acute respiratory infections have been registered in UN shelters—a fraction of the real total.

Gaza resident Renad al-Helou told Al-Monitor, “It’s like the apocalypse. We are tired. There’s no water, no food. … There’s nothing left in Gaza. There’s only destruction, suffering and torture.”

Aided by its fascist settler allies, the IDF is also stepping up its assault in the West Bank. Around 200 Palestinians have been killed there since October 7—adding to the 250 killed previously in 2023—and over 1,000, including 450 children, displaced by violence or oppressive restrictions; six communities have been abandoned entirely, taking the total for the year to 11. Incidents of settler violence have more than doubled from three a day to seven.

The IDF has placed whole communities under siege. In Hebron, the H2 district home to 39,000 Palestinians and occupied by 900 Israeli settlers is under its harshest lockdown in 20 years, with Palestinians largely confined to their homes at gunpoint. A soldier who threw a stun grenade into a congregation at prayer in a mosque in Budrus, near Ramallah, was only suspended after video footage emerged of the attack.

Since October 7, roughly 2,800 Palestinians have been arrested in the West Bank, taking the total to 7,800, including 300 children and 72 women, according to the Palestinian Authority Commission for Prisoners’ Affairs. The organisation reports that at least four have died in custody in recent weeks and that hundreds show medical evidence of torture.

A video from earlier this month has been verified by Reuters, showing masked IDF soldiers in Hebron carrying out an arrest, beating a Palestinian man with their rifles in front of his family while streaming the assault on TikTok.

Military raids are being escalated. On Saturday, an Israeli warplane hit a target in Nablus, killing five people, for the first time since the Second Intifada.

Were the Biblical Prophets Anti-Semitic?

Michael Hudson

Photograph Source: Wolfgang Sauber – CC BY-SA 3.0

If the prophets of ancient Israel such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Malachi and Amos were alive today, Benjamin Netanyahu would accuse them of anti-Semitism for daring to describe his government as a travesty of what the Mosaic covenant was all about. A common thread running throughout the Jewish Bible – Christianity’s Old Testament – was to criticize kings, the wealthy and corrupt courts for violating the Mosaic commandments to create a fair and equitable society protecting the poor from the economic oppression of debt bondage, and loss of their land. If the prophets were summoned to give judgment today, it is Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party and the steeply unequal economy of Israel that would be condemned as violating the most basic laws of Biblical Judaism.

Prophet after prophet described the Lord as being so displeased with Israel on so many occasions for deviating from his commandments that he withdrew his protection and condemned the land to which Moses had led his followers to be conquered as punishment. The Biblical prophets attributed Israel’s defeat by Sargon in 722 BC to the Lord’s punishment for its falling away from the covenant the Lord had offered. Israel’s punishment fit the crime: Just as its wealthy creditor elite had dispossessed their brethren from the land, so the ten tribes of Israel were deported to Mesopotamia and Media, and Judah’s size was reduced to only the region surrounding Jerusalem.

Ezekiel, the great prophet of the Exile, was taken to Babylonia in 597 BC as a military hostage. He became the leading influence on Ezra and the priestly school that edited the Torah’s early sources into a version that was finalized when the Jews returned from Babylon and wrote the Babylonian concepts of economic justice into the Mosaic Holiness Code. In an apocalyptic tone Ezekiel 7 announces: “The word of the Lord came to me: … ‘The end is now upon you and I will unleash my anger against you. I will judge you according to your conduct and repay you for all your detestable practices,’” citing the polarization of wealth by the wealthiest Jews, corrupting the law courts and violating the original covenant with the Lord.

Were the prophets self-loathing Jews? Are those who criticize today’s right-wing politicians abolishing the land’s courts of justice, urging the mass murder of civilians and destroying an entire society’s infrastructure anti-Semites? Does commenting that October 7^th did not occur “in a vacuum,” as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres did – even indeed after characterizing it as an atrocity – make one an anti-Semite?

What I find most amazing is that no religious scholars are pointing out that Netanyahu’s claim to be following a Biblical covenant as his excuse for committing genocide to seize Palestinian land and destroy its existing population is a travesty of what actually is written in the Bible.

By a sleight-of-hand like that of a stage magician trying to distract the audience’s attention from what really is happening, Netanyahu has evoked what he claims to be a Biblical excuse for Israeli genocide. But what he pretends to be a covenant in the tradition of Moses is a vicious demand by the judge and grey eminence Samuel telling Saul, the general whom he hopes to make king: “Now go and smite Amalek [an enemy of Israel], and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys” (1 Samuel 15:3).

These were not the Lord’s own words, and Samuel was no Moses. And there was no blanket promise to back the Jews regardless of their behavior. And indeed, in following Samuel’s demand for conquest – as a means of making Saul popular enough to be made king – Saul broke the Lord’s commandments about proper religious ceremonial and dietary behavior. One would have no idea from Netanyahu’s celebration of the compact between Samuel and Saul to become popular by military conquest that Saul’s misbehavior led Samuel himself to rebuke Saul and tell him that the Lord had decided that another man must be found to be king of Israel.

It was not the Lord offering that command to destroy Amalek, but a prophet anxious to place a king on the throne. Invocation of such a command is prima facie evidence of an intention to commit genocide. But that seemed less important to Netanyahu than pandering to the desire for revenge amongst Israelis. Netanyahu makes no mention of the fact that Saul disobeyed the Lord’s commandments and the Lord rejected him as king. Nor does Likud acknowledge the context, a few chapters earlier in I Samuel 12:15, describing the corrupt rule of judges and Samuel’s warning that “if you do not obey the Lord, and if you rebel against his commands, his hand will be against you,” and the Lord’s warning that “if you persist in doing evil, both you and your king will be swept away.”

The Jewish Bible is remarkable in criticizing the kings who ruled Judah and Israel. It is in fact a long narrative of social revolution, in which religious leaders sought – often successfully – to check the power of a selfish and aggressive oligarchy that was denounced again and again for its greed in impoverishing the poor, taking their land and reducing them to debt bondage. (My book “… and forgive them their debts” [Dresden 2018] describes this history.) The Jewish kings, wealthy families and corrupt courts led the Lord repeatedly to abandon them in the face of Assyria, Babylon and lesser opponents when they lapsed into selfish and oppressive behavior.

What was the covenant at Horeb near Mount Sinai? Simply put, the Lord gave Moses the Ten Commandments, which had a moral focus on economic justice, and made a bargain binding all future Jews to obey these commandments (Exodus 19-23 and Deuteronomy 5:2 and 28:43). From the very beginning the Lord threatened to punish the Jews if they broke this covenant. The prophets are quoted as citing the many ways in which succeeding generations broke it. Reference to that context of fair rule was the role of a prophet (both ancient and modern): to awaken the people – and to be despised by those in power, especially by oppressive oligarchies. Judea, in accordance with the commandments, was supposed to provide mutual aid and protect the poor, not let creditors take the land for themselves.

So Judea lost battles to foreigners, whom the prophets described as used by the Lord as his instrument to punish the Jews for their transgression against the economic and other moral laws that the Lord had laid down. Does one doubt that today’s greater Israel [the land over which it exerts total control, including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem] is economically polarized and unequal both financially and in terms of human rights?

Deuteronomy 28:21-25 warns that if the Jews fail to obey the Lord’s commandments, “The Lord will plague you with diseases until he has destroyed you from the land you are entering to possess,” and “will cause you to be defeated before your enemies.” Deuteronomy then (29:24-25) reminds the Jews that if the Lord does to them as he had done to Sodom and Gomorrah, Admath and Zeboiim, “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt.”

The prophets described what obeying the covenant meant. Isaiah 5:3 and 8 cited economic inequality as the greatest woe, blaming the elders and leaders for taking “plunder from the poor into your houses.” He declaimed: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field, till no space is left alone in the land.” That is exactly the fate that is befalling the Palestinians driven off their land by today’s Israel as a settler state.

Isaiah 10:1-3 declaims: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and rob my oppressed people of justice, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless. What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar?” And in 29:13-15: “The Lord says: ‘These people come to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is made up only of rules taught by men. … Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord.”

Sound familiar? Isaiah 48:1 and 8 says, “Listen, O house of Jacob, you who are called by the name of Israel … and invoke the God of Israel – but not in truth or righteousness. … Well I know how treacherous you are; you were called a rebel from birth.”

The next prophet, Jeremiah 2, accuses Israel of abandoning the Lord and thus breaking the covenant, bringing disaster upon itself with its “wickedness and backsliding” and becoming “a corrupt, wild vine.” Calling Israel unfaithful (3:8 and 20-21) the Lord “gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away,” and Judah was just as bad. The Lord again threatened (17:3-4): “Through your own fault you will lose the inheritance I gave you … for you have kindled my anger and it will burn forever.”

In a move that has failed to shock or dismay conservative Christians the United States has become modern Israel’s protector and lord, while Israel’s economy (like that of the United States) is polarizing along the same lines that the Biblical prophets denounced, such as when Ezekiel 7 and 16 repeated the Lord’s anger at unfaithful Jerusalem, saying metaphorically (16:13) that “you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute,” not heeding the poor and needy. And in 34:2: “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves” but plunder their flock.

Amos 2 accuses Israel of numerous sins: “They sell the righteous for silver, and … trample on the heads of the poor … and deny justice to the oppressed.” And Micah 7:3 declaims: “Woe to those who plan inequity, to those who plot evil on their beds … because it is in their power to do it. … Therefore, the Lord said, ‘I am planning disaster against this people, from which you cannot save yourselves’” when the wealthy join up as “the ruler demands gifts, the judge accepts bribes, the powerful dictate what they desire – they all conspire together.”

Today’s modern Zionism is at odds with the Jewish Bible. That is understandable given that its ideology comes from a very secular group despite its recent takeover by self-identified orthodox Jews. The rhetoric used by Netanyahu is a travesty when one notes how the Jewish Bible proclaimed that wealth and property were to be distributed equitably, not concentrated in the hands of an oligarchy. Exodus 23:1 and 9 give the following insight into how aliens – the Palestinians of their day – were to be treated: “Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong,” but “lay down the law of justice and mercy: Do not oppress an alien; you yourselves know how it feels to be aliens, because you were aliens in Egypt.”

Is it justice and mercy to shut off water, food, medicine and fuel to an entire population and level or damage half of its buildings and most of its critical infrastructure including entire swaths of homes? Is it justice and mercy to force hospitals to shut down, bomb ambulances, drop six 2,000 pound bombs on a refugee camp?

While billions around the world witness the super-Kristalnacht carnage in Gaza and blatant pogroms on the West Bank “serious” Western journalists warn that an existential threat is posed by refugees with hang gliders but no planes, tanks or artillery pieces. The same journalists ignore the time-proven truism that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the faith” and that killing thousands of innocents immediately and many thousands in the chaos that follows will not weaken but strengthen a resistance movement. It was that same reaction in the wake of Nazism that turned today’s Zionist leaders into haters.

In the final lines of the Jewish Bible, Malachi 4 speaks of the Lord’s emphasis that Israel’s covenant with God had a strong contractual quid pro quo as a condition for his support: “‘All the arrogant and every evil-doer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire,’ says the Lord Almighty. … ‘Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel.’” If these laws continued to be disobeyed, the Lord threatened, “I will come and strike the land with a curse.”

It seems that this curse has now come, in the form of most of the world’s population so appalled at the self-righteous genocide being committed by two secular governments claiming (to the discredit of Western religions) divine sanctification, Israel and the United States, just as the Western non-Soviet economy created in 1945 in the wake of World War II is breaking into two parts.

We are living in secular times. The United States has become modern Israel’s protector and lord, and it itself has become corrupt along the same lines that the great prophets denounced. American evangelists, like the Israeli government, have excluded the message of the Biblical prophets and Jesus’s social message, selecting only the Covenant as a deed of conquest and promise of a ticket to heaven without any behavioral quid pro quo involved.

The broad spectrum of Judeo-Christian religion has been secularized as today’s world differs so fundamentally from that of classical antiquity. American TV evangelicals make a travesty of Jesus’s attempt to restore the Mosaic Jubilee Year cancelling the debts that threatened ancient populations with bondage and led to the loss of their means of self-support on the land. The “Prosperity Gospel” has replaced Jesus with Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek.

Already in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, almost as soon as Constantine made Christianity the Roman State religion, Augustine changed the translation of the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount by replacing debt cancellation with the non-economic idea of original sin inborn from Adam. To cap matters, the new interpretation replaced Jesus’s call for debt cancellation with Church demands for monetary contributions to obtain indulgences and forgiveness. Subsequent Christianity became so pro-creditor that it defended the sanctity of debt, not its cancellation. To finance the Crusades in the 13^th century, the popes excommunicated Christian clergy and secular reformers who opposed paying usury – which was re-defined as “interest” and permitted as long as it was Christian bankers who were making the loans.

Israel may have a convoluted legal right to shoot Palestinians coming over its wall in an attempt to defend land that settlers have seized illegally from them. But as an occupying power, it does not have the sanctimonious right to disregard virtually every international law regarding war and collective punishment simply for revenge and to demonstrate to Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Iran what it will do to them with American support if they join in the fray. Netanyahu’s actions and claims for religious sanctification for them are the antithesis of the original Judaism. His Likud government rejects the ethic of the Jewish Bible as much as America’s Christian evangelists reject the message of Jesus.

How the US funds its Israeli attack dog

Jean Shaoul

US President Joe Biden has famously stated, “Israel is the best three-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

That the Biden administration has just asked for a supplementary emergency $14.3 billion, more than three times the annual budget, for Israel confirms that what is meant by this panegyric is Israel’s role as a garrison state, fronting US imperialism’s aggression in the strategically vital Middle East region.

US President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [AP Photo/AP Photo/Debbie Hill]

The genocidal offensive against Gaza is being wholly funded by Washington in furtherance of broader war aims targeting Iran.

Some $5.25 billion of this vastly inflated sum will go to the Defense Department, largely to replace arms stocks given to Israel; $4 billion will go to Israeli arms corporations and Raytheon for air and missile defense systems; $1.35 billion to Israel for research into and development of laser interceptors; $150 million for State Department requirements; and $3.5 billion for Biden’s discretionary distribution, outside Congressional and public scrutiny, to Israel’s warmongering government.

Washington’s determined effort to ensure that its attack dog can continue slaughtering the Palestinians in Gaza underscores that the horrific crimes being carried out there are part of US imperialism’s drive to establish American supremacy throughout the Middle East.

All of this is in gross violation of US legislation prohibiting aid to governments implicated in violations of human rights and to nuclear-armed states or states that seek to use such funds for the development of nuclear weapons. Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, but it is an open secret that it has missiles pointed at all its rivals in the region. Seymour Hersch, in his book, “The Samson Option”, has documented the direct role of successive US presidents, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, in Israel’s nuclear programme.

The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. New York: 1991, Random House. First Edition

The US has provided Israel with more aid since World War II than any other country, a total of $158 billion in non-inflation-adjusted dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding, equal to $260 billion in 2021 (inflation-adjusted) US dollars. While Israel received significant economic assistance between 1971 and 2007, today almost all US aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.

The US provided very little aid, just $50 million a year, until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when the Zionist state demonstrated its strength vis a vis all the Arab armies and began its rule over the Palestinian population. US assistance increased after every military intervention and suppression of the Palestinians. It increased after the Oslo peace talks, and again after they collapsed. It has continued long after Israel faced no external military threat. The purpose of US aid is to ensure Tel Aviv’s military superiority.

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights during the Six Day War, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]

By 1986, aid had risen to a massive $3 billion a year (split between $1.2 billion economic and $1.8 billion military assistance) plus some $500 million a year aid from other parts of the US budget—or, in some cases, off-budget. In 2009, military aid alone rose to $3 billion a year and in 2018 to $3.8 billion a year, making Israel the highest per capita recipient of US aid in the world.

Similarly, the US provides economic assistance to a country with a population of 9 million that has a GDP of $564 billion, far larger than the combined GDP of its immediate Arab neighbours, including Egypt that has a population of 105 million. Only Saudi Arabia, with its massive oil wealth, has a larger GDP—at just over one trillion dollars—in the Middle East.

US aid to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, with its population of approximately one billion, is around $8 billion a year.

Normally US aid is tied to specific projects and the purchase of US goods and services, and overseen by the government agency, USAID; but most US aid to Israel goes straight into its Exchequer as a cash transfer. Aid usually comes in the form of loans that have interest and repayment obligations. Most of the military loans to Israel, however, have been converted into grants, with the remaining military loans were “forgiven” by Congress, ultimately paying for the purchase of US weaponry—a backdoor subsidy to the military-industry complex. Only economic aid had to be repaid with interest.

Even the annual grants to Israel have repeatedly been insufficient. In 1992-96, the US stepped in to provide $10 billion in loan guarantees, allowing Israel to borrow funds at a lower cost, to prevent state bankruptcy.

The US has also greenlighted settlement expansion. While officially President Bill Clinton deducted the cost of settlements from the aid, he simply made equivalent amounts available as grants from other sources that subsidised the settlements. In 2003, during the second Intifada, the Bush administration provided a further $9 billion, a scheme that was extended in 2012.

Washington has also provided political cover for Israel at the United Nations. Since 1972, the US has vetoed at least 53 resolutions in the Security Council critical of Israel’s policies and actions in the Occupied Territories, while using the veto threat to get resolutions withdrawn or watered down on countless other occasions.

US imperialism’s garrison state

What does Israel do for the US that merits such lavish support?

First and foremost, Israel kept the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow at bay during the Cold War with its defeats of Egypt and Syria, both of whom were armed by the Soviet Union, in 1967 and 1973. It prevented victories by the Palestinians and their supporters beyond Israel’s borders: in Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon 1976-82—where it supported the fascistic Christian Phalange against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its Shiite allies in the Lebanese civil war that raged between 1975-90—as well as in the occupied territories. It thus helped to suppress the Arab working class and maintain the decrepit and corrupt bourgeois national regimes in power.

Aftermath of massacre of Palestinians directed by Lebanese Forces with the complicity of senior members of the Israeli Cabinet and Defence Forces and conducted by Christian Phalangists and members of the South Lebanon Army in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. [Photo: Robin Moyer, USA, Black Star for Time. Beirut, Lebanon, 18 September 1982. ]

In effect, Israel replaced Britain after its withdrawal “east of Suez” as the policeman of the Middle East on behalf of US imperialism.

The Israeli military occupied Lebanon between 1982 and 2000, long after the US had been forced to withdraw following Hezbollah’s massive bomb attacks on American forces in 1983. In 2006, it launched an ultimately unsuccessful war on Lebanon, aimed at transforming its northern neighbour into a vassal state as part of US imperialism’s plans to establish its hegemony over the entire region.

Like its earlier interventions against the Palestinians and their allies, the immediate aim of the war—the elimination of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah as a military and political force within Lebanon—was to crush all resistance to Israeli and American domination and strengthen the power of rightwing, pro-US forces as an essential preparation for regime change in Syria and ultimately Iran.

Israel’s frequent wars provided the US with live testing for its arms, often against Soviet weaponry. With its nuclear arsenal, Israel had weapons capable of reaching the Soviet Union. It prevented the emergence of Iraq as a nuclear power with the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981. Similarly, in 2007, it bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in southeast Syria, reportedly after the Bush administration expressed its unwillingness to do so and despite fears that Syria would retaliate.

Alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, after it was destroyed by Israeli air strike [Photo: US government - Found at CNN but released by US government]

No less valuable were Israel’s covert services that provided its paymaster in Washington with deniability. Tel Aviv served as a conduit for US arms to regimes the US could not be seen to be assisting: apartheid South Africa, Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, and numerous military dictatorships and right-wing rebel forces, particularly in Latin America. Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, provides Washington with intelligence gathering not just in the Middle East but in other key strategic areas like Russia and Central Asia and even parts of Latin America.

In Iran, Israeli agents have assassinated senior nuclear scientists and sabotaged critical infrastructure. As well as attacks on Iranian targets by air and at sea, it has carried out thousands of attacks on Iranian-backed forces in Syria since the start of the CIA-backed proxy war for regime change in 2011.

The US US-made F-35I Adir recorded its first operational strike, targeting alledged Iranian military facilities in Syria during 2018's clashes. [Photo by Deror Avi / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Israel has trialed novel forms of interrogation and torture, later to be used in Iraq, and pioneered “targeted assassinations” of Palestinian leaders, now a widespread practice for Washington, including against its own citizens in Yemen.

Washington plans war against Iran

US “aid” is nothing more than payment for services rendered, conditional on Tel Aviv’s faithful execution of Washington’s dictates.

Palestinians look for survivors following an Israeli airstrike in Khan Younis refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman) [AP Photo]

The World Socialist Web Site repeatedly warned that the fascistic government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pushing for an all-out confrontation with the Palestinians, with the army, police and settlers mounting near daily attacks on towns and villages in the West Bank since the start of 2023 and religious bigots seeking ever greater control over the al-Aqsa Mosque compound.

At the same time, Netanyahu was ramping up his rhetoric against Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon. His efforts were aimed at inciting retaliatory attacks, creating a climate of fear and apprehension to deflect the explosive social tensions and political opposition to his government outwards against a “common enemy.”

The US sanctioned the war in advance. It is working closely with Israel’s made-in-the-USA war machine to carry it out, dispatching war ships and troops to the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf. At the diplomatic level, it refuses to even consider a ceasefire.

President Joe Biden openly legitimizes Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing as an instrument of US foreign policy. It is a continuation of its military aggression in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria and signals future military assaults on Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere in pursuit of US domination of the resource-rich region.

The end of the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the demise of public health

Benjamin Mateus

It was about four years ago that the virus that causes COVID-19 jumped from animals into their handlers and then the local customers that shopped at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. This crossover led to a sustained community transmission that over several weeks caught the attention of the local medical and public health officials and soon the world at large.

Since then, the various forms of criminal neglect on the part of the ruling elites, such as “herd immunity,” “let it rip” and “learn to live with the virus,” have led to 7 million official global COVID-19 deaths. The estimated global excess deaths of 27.4 million are nearly four times the official death toll. With the abandonment of all essential COVID-19 trackers on rates of infection and direct and related deaths from COVID-19, the exact current impact of the disease remains largely a subject of guesswork and will only be really known when epidemiologists and modelers conduct their retrospective analysis of year-to-year trends in mortality.

Red painted hearts inscribed with loved ones names are seen on the The National Covid Memorial Wall dedicated to those who died from the coronavirus in London, Tuesday, June 13, 2023. [AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

In the US, where wastewater levels of SARS-CoV-2 have continued to be published for the time being, as of November 6, levels of community transmission were continuing their climb or remaining at high levels. Modelers like Dr. Mike Hoerger estimate the total at more than 670,000 daily cases. Certainly, with the holidays fast approaching and the latest iterations of the Omicron variants circulating, these figures are expected to climb. We are once more amid the early phase of the winter wave.

Since September 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 tracker, emergency room visits, hospitalizations and deaths are up approximately 10 percent. As of the week ending November 11, there have been 16,239 COVID-19 hospitalizations. In the week ending October 21 (the date reflects the delay in tracking deaths), another 1,265 people died. In total, throughout October over 5,000 people lost their lives.

Also worrisome is the abysmal vaccine uptake seen across the country, with only 14 percent of adults thus far having received a dose of the latest version of the COVID-19 boosters. Masking has become essentially nonexistent, even in healthcare settings where facility-induced COVID-19 infections pose great hazards to nursing home patients and those admitted to hospitals.

Perhaps most glaring has been the recent report in the New York Times concerning the massive toll COVID-19 has taken on the cognitive functions of younger Americans, and by extension, hundreds of millions of people, even billions, across the globe. In the US, the prevalence of Long COVID ranges from 5 to 15 percent, or an estimated 10 to 30 million working age adults.

The article notes, “The number of working-age adults reporting ‘serious difficulty’ thinking has climbed [during the pandemic] by an estimated one million people.” The percent of 18- to 44-year-olds that say they have serious difficult remembering is now on par with those between ages of 45 to 64. That these trends have not returned to their previous marks suggest the impact will have a chronic toll on the population and are ongoing.

Studies on the impact of COVID-19 on the neurological system have found that almost a third of people who get COVID-19 develop some level of cognitive impairments several months later, ranging from mild to debilitating, according to the report. Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, told the Times, “It’s not just [brain] fog, it’s a brain injury, basically. There are neurovascular changes. There’s inflammation. There are changes on MRIs” (brain scans).

Many of those disabled have to continue to work to earn a living despite the added impact to their ability to think and function normally, which compounds the stress on their health and places them at risk for making serious mistakes that have untold consequences on their work. Yet, with funding for such studies having dried up and no treatment to address these ongoing chronic concerns, the millions of ongoing infections are only exacerbating the evolving health crisis. Such disregard by the political establishment and public health officials is unprecedented and constitutes gross criminal negligence.

These reports do not take into consideration the impact the virus has on other disabling symptoms, like intense fatigue, respiratory difficulties or heart palpitations, to name a few others. The ability for the infection to cause immune dysregulation means the potential for developing complications with other viral, bacterial and fungal infections. The persistence of activated immune T-cells in people, who have returned to feeling normal after their acute infection, remains both a puzzle and a concern for researchers. These have potential consequences in igniting previously checked viral infections like herpes and Epstein-Barr virus and possibly permitting the development of cancers.

Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, an epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who called the burden of Long COVID staggeringly high, explained, “It appears that the effects of Long COVID for many will not only impact such patients and their quality of life, but potentially will contribute to a decline in life expectancy and also may impact labor participation, economic productivity, and societal well-being.”

Yet, rather than heeding the continued dangers posed by viral evolution and recognition of the mass disabling event caused by Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) (the formal term for Long COVID) to invest both in infrastructure to sanitize indoor air and build an internationally based public health consortium to monitor the impact of infectious pathogens on the global population, we are in a far more precarious position globally.

Indeed, every government has accepted the maxim that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease” and adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the threat posed by an array of other pathogens, undiscovered yet or previously recognized. The lesson being taken by those who dominate corporate America and the financial system is that a strict adherence to sound principles of public health is bad for business.

In a recent comprehensive editorial published on November 6, 2023, by the John Snow Project, a group of scientists and researchers concerned by the lack of attention being given, titled “Endemic SARS-CoV-2 and the death of public health,” wrote on the ability to eliminate the virus:

Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

They then added:

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

The increases in previously checked communicable diseases like measles, TB and syphilis are just the symptom of a public health system that has been in decline for nearly two decades. The decline in life expectancy, especially among working people as compared to those more well off, is the clearest demonstration of the rising tide of inequality that is devastating the working class.

Germany to prosecute slogan calling for freedom for Palestine as a crime

Justus Leicht

Use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is now being prosecuted in Germany as a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment of up to three years or a fine. Munich Chief Prosecutor Andreas Franck, who is also the antisemitism commissioner of the Bavarian judiciary, has already announced his intention to pursue charges based on the slogan as well as prohibited Nazi slogans and symbols.

The legal basis is the ban on Hamas, which Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats—SPD) issued on 2 November. Hamas was previously considered an illegal terrorist organisation, but Faeser issued a specific ban on the organisation, even though Hamas officially has no organised presence in Germany.

Demonstration at Oranienplatz Berlin against the genocide in Gaza, October 28, 2023.

The five-page prohibition order published in the Federal Gazette lists “Hamas signs,” the public use of which is prohibited. The list also includes “the slogan ‘From the river to the sea’ (in German or other languages).” According to Chief Prosecutor Franck, use of the slogan could be punished on the basis of Section 86a of the Criminal Code: “Use of signs of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations.”

Until now, German prosecutors had regarded the statement as legal. It was in principle covered by freedom of expression, the public prosecutor’s offices in Berlin, Munich and other cities explained, according to the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Those who wish for Palestine to be “free,” it was said, are not necessarily calling for violence. The demand can also be a call for peaceful change of the status quo. The Berlin Administrative Court ruled as recently as August that the slogan itself was not punishable by law.

However, with the prohibition order, the legal requirements have changed. Instead of being prosecuted for “incitement to hatred,” which requires clear proof of incitement to violence, anyone using the slogan can now be punished solely on the grounds that the minister of the interior has declared it a “sign” of a prohibited organisation.

This is an arbitrary act of censorship and suppression of the fundamental right to freedom of expression.

In recent weeks, millions of people of all religions and nationalities, including Israelis and many Jews, have taken to the streets worldwide to protest the Israeli massacre in Gaza. The governments that support Israeli crimes are responding with censorship, intimidation and repression.

In Germany, peaceful demonstrations are slandered by the media as “antisemitic” and banned by the police or made subject to strict conditions. Large police squads intimidate the demonstrators, censor every spoken and written word, arrest participants en masse, and seize leaflets and banners.

The criminalisation of the call for freedom for Palestine is another stage in this spiral of repression. The claim that the slogan “From the river to the sea” is a “sign” of Hamas is simply a lie.

The roots of the slogan go back at least to the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. The Palestinian National Charter defined Palestine as the historic British Mandate territory of 1947, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. A distinction was explicitly made between Jews as a religious group and Zionism as a “racist” and “political movement” associated with international imperialism. The Charter also explicitly stated that Jews can also be Palestinians.

The goal of the Palestinians has traditionally been a secular, democratic Palestine without occupation or discrimination. Thus, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, long the largest and dominant faction within the PLO, declared in 1969:

Fatah, the National Liberation Movement of Palestine, solemnly proclaims that the ultimate goal of its struggle is the restoration of an independent, democratic state of Palestine in which all citizens, regardless of their religion, will enjoy equal rights.

Hamas, on the other hand, did not emerge until 1987 as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In its revised charter of 2017, it also committed itself to a Palestine “from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean.” In doing so, it did not invent anything new, but merely adopted a decades-long orientation of Palestinian organisations.

This formulation did not appear in the Hamas charter of 1988. In its revised charter produced three decades after its founding, Hamas also distinguished between Judaism and Zionism, unlike in its 1988 charter. It said: “Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project and not with the Jews because of their religion.”

In Israeli politics, too, there were repeated references to the formula “from the river to the sea” long before Hamas was founded. Contrary to the PLO’s interpretation, however, this did not mean a secular, democratic state, but “Eretz Israel,” a state under Jewish domination.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party was explicitly founded on this basis. It said in its original 1977 platform: “The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked to the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed over to any foreign administration; between the sea and the Jordan there will be only Israeli sovereignty.”

Israel’s current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism Party, which is largely responsible for the settlements in the West Bank, wrote an essay for a right-wing Israeli think tank in 2017 titled “Israel’s Decisive Plan,” which states:

We will make it clear that our national quest for a Jewish state from the river to the sea is an accomplished fact, a fact that cannot be discussed or negotiated.

However, the supporters of Netanyahu and Smotrich in Germany do not have to fear that they will receive a visit from the public prosecutor’s office. On the contrary, the German government has declared its full solidarity with and provides military support to the Israeli government as it carries out with murderous violence the policy of killing or forcibly displacing the Palestinians. Anyone who protests that there should be freedom and equality “between the river and the sea” instead of occupation and apartheid will be criminalised.

Protests demanding a limit to front-line deployments continue, as infighting intensifies within Ukrainian ruling class

Jason Melanovski

The friends and families of Ukrainian soldiers protest forced conscription and the treatment of soldiers by the Ukrainan military.

This past week protests were again held throughout Ukraine demanding that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky limit deployments of troops to just 18 months. Many Ukrainian soldiers—if they have survived this long—have never been permitted to leave the front or return home. Despite the fact that protesters have circulated a petition gathering 25,000 signatures, Zelensky has thus far refused to clarify the terms of military deployment.

While they are relatively small in size, significantly,  the protests have been held throughout the country, including in Western Ukraine where nationalist political forces have historically received the most support. Most participants are families of soldiers, and many have vowed to continue regular protests until their demands are met. 

Though as yet in an embryonic form, the protests herald the emergence of mass popular opposition to a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives. They come on the heels of a disastrously failed counter-offensive, which cost tens of thousands of lives, and amid a growing world-wide movement opposing the imperialist-backed genocide in Gaza. Under these conditions, the protests have provoked immense nervousness in the Ukrainian ruling class and have fueled bitter infighting within the state and military apparatus. 

While political crisis and scandals have been a regular feature of the rule of the Ukrainian oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1991, the current struggle is significant in that the Zelensky regime is coming into open conflict with the Valery Zaluzhnyi, the head of the general staff of its Western-funded Armed Forces, which is carrying out the imperialist proxy war against Russia.

In early November, Zaluzhnyi gave an interview to the British Economist in which he revealed that after over a combined 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian soldiers had been killed, the war was essentially at a stalemate, and a major breakthrough by Ukraine was unlikely. In a separate essay, Zaluzhnyi further warned that the stalemate posed “significant risks for both the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the state as a whole” and concluded with a plea for even more deadly weapons in order to “break the military parity with the enemy.”

Such statements directly contradicted the official line of Zelensky and his associates that Ukraine would undoubtedly retake not only all of the Donbass region but Crimea as well if the West would continue to provide Kiev with an unending supply of weapons and money.

Zelensky and his entourage immediately went into damage control with Zelensky appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press to reject Zaluzhnyi’s statements and insist that no such stalemate existed. Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council’s Center for Countering Disinformation absurdly stated that Moscow had launched the campaign to discredit Zaluzhnyi, trying to convince Ukrainians of a “split between the government and the military.”

A day later, Zelensky then announced that the presidential elections, originally scheduled to take place next year, were canceled. Zaluzhnyi was considered his most likely main competitor. In popularity polls, Zaluzhnyi and the Armed Forces continue to garner more support than Zelensky.

The same day that Zelensky announced the cancellation of the presidential elections, Zaluzhnyi’s assistant and close friend Hennadii Chastiakov was killed by an explosive device in his home that was given to him as a birthday present, reportedly by one of his associates.

There are also signs that a broader purge of the military command is underway. Last Monday, sources revealed to Ukrainska Pravda that the Ministry of Defense under the newly appointed Rustem Umerov was preparing to dismiss three high-ranking military commanders.

According to the report, the commander of the Medical Forces of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Tetyana Ostashchenko, the commander of the Operational and Strategic Group of the “Tavria” troops, Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, and the commander of the United Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Serhiy Naev, were all to be removed. 

Tarnavskyi played a leading role in the failed counteroffensive, while Naev was reportedly implicated in the failed defense of the Kherson region against the Russian surprise invasion in February 2022. Meanwhile, Ostachenko’s dismissal has long been called for by medics and volunteers within the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The Defense Ministry has so far refused to comment on the report. Earlier on November 3, Zelensky himself dismissed Viktor Khorenko, former commander of Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces. At the time, Khorenko claimed that no reason was given, and his firing was unknown even to Zaluzhnyi, who is clearly being undermined by Zelensky. 

In a radio interview last Tuesday, Ukrainian parliament member Roman Kostenko of the pro-EU Holos Party stated that “it is unacceptable that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief can do this during the war (dismiss generals - ed.) without the approval of the Commander-in-Chief.” A veteran of the war in Donbass, Kostemko is also the current secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence and is clearly speaking for a significant section of the military and ruling class in voicing his opposition to Zelensky.

Right-wing Ukrainian social media posts regularly call for Zelensky and his entourage to be arrested for treason due to the rapid losses in southern Ukraine in the weeks following the initial Russian invasion. Zaluzhnyi, an open admirer of the Ukrainian fascist leader and war criminal Stepan Bandera, would undoubtedly be viewed by such forces as an improvement over the former comedian Zelensky.

Ominously, on November 7 Volodymyr Ariev, a Ukrainian parliament member from the European Solidarity party of former President Petro Poroshenko posted to Facebook that Umerov had submitted to fire Zaluzhnyi as Commander-in-Chief. Ariev later deleted the post.

In an indication of the intervention of the imperialist powers in the conflict, last week, Zaluzhny was also publicly implicated in the destruction of the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline in September of last year, according to reports from both the Washington Post and Der Spiegel. Both outlets are closely tied to governments and intelligence agencies in Washington and Berlin, respectively. 

According to the reports, Roman Chervinsky, a colonel in the Ukrainian Special Forces with experience both in military intelligence and the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) , coordinated the attack on both the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines running under the Baltic Sea to Germany. If the reports are correct, it is clear that Chervinsky could not have acted alone. Rather, he would have received direct orders from higher ranking officers who all reported to Zaluzhnyi.

Regardless of the credibility of these publications—since the pipeline bombings, many different versions of the events leading up to the attacks, have appeared in the NATO-aligned bourgeois media—they are clearly bound up with the ongoing struggle between the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, led by Zaluzhnyi.