Palestine has a binary option for its future; either it exists as an independent state or it is absorbed by Israel.
The move to incorporate it into Israel has triggered the International Criminal Court to charge Netanyahu with ‘crimes against humanity’ – the first time a Westerner has been so charged.
The ’Palestine-as-a-state’ option is now the massively preferred choice of most members of the UN. Norway, Ireland and Spain just joined the list of 140 nations – more than two-thirds of the United Nations – who have recognized Palestine as a state.
Saudi Arabia has also joined in the push for Palestinian recognition – not an automatic reflex, as some might have thought, given the blizzard of news recently about how Saudi and Israel were getting together. Jordan's Minister of Foreign Affairs Ayman Safadi also said his country "values the decision" made by Spain, Norway and Ireland.
Poland also signed on to the two-state solution immediately afterwards.
This support is long overdue. In 1852, there were only 13,000 Jews in the Holy Land, against 327,000 Palestinians. By 1925 there were 765,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Jews. After a battle during the opening phase of Israel’s existence between balanced numbers of Arabs and Israelis, the uncoordinated Arab war failed as it was swamped by the British pledge to sponsor Jewish immigration.
Now, perhaps, the wheel is turning back a bit towards justice for Palestine.
Speaking of Justice, Netanyahu was not alone in being charged by ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Hamas leadership was also charged, as was Netanyahu’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. I was just getting to warm up to him, too, for taking a stand against Netanyahu’s policies. But now a chamber of judges will evaluate the ICC’s application for arrest warrants. The ICC is prohibited from conducting a trial against an individual whose own state is able and willing to hold independent legal proceedings; Israel of course says that it has such courts and that the ICC has no jurisdiction.
Israeli opinion seems tilted against Netanyahu’s case. “Netanyahu's first arrest warrant should have been issued in Jerusalem, not The Hague,” advises reporter Uri Misgav. “Not because of war crimes in Gaza, but because of his ongoing crimes against the State of Israel and the people of Israel.
“There has been no greater criminal in Israeli history than Benjamin Netanyahu.” Violence by the police against Israeli citizens has been normalized under Netanyahu, he asserts.
He is backed by Israeli prize-winning author Gideon Levy, who warns that Israel’s response to the ICC charges – ranting against the Court while wallowing in victimhood – misses the key question: Were there, or were there not, crimes?
“If war crimes were committed, mass killing and starvation, as suggested by the courageous prosecutor Karim Khan (in whose appointment Israel was involved behind the scenes, having found his predecessor suspect), then there are criminals responsible for them. And if there are war criminals, it is the world's duty to being them to justice.”
It would have been better for Israel to look inward, advises Levy, and see its own portrait. How did Israel get to this point? “How could anybody make the case that there was no starvation or intentional mass killing?
“For 57 years, Israel has been maintaining a regime of wrongdoing and evil, and now, at last, the world is waking up and starting to act against it. Will it also be able to wake up at least some Israelis from their heedless, twisted sense of justice?”
Germany’s spokesman Steffen Hebestreit was asked on Wednesday if the German government would execute an ICC arrest order against Netanyahu for alleged war crimes.
Hebestreit said, "Of course. Yes, we abide by the law."
Ironically, the ICC was formed in response to the killing of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany. Germany today is a generous donor to the ICC. That it would now arrest and an Israeli Prime Minister and defense minister is a bit of a shock.
But it is America’s response to the ICC that I find most discouraging. There are calls to ‘sanction’ the ICC. The ICC exists to promote the concept of a rules-based world. America keeps hitting Russia and China over the head about their violations of international boundaries and maritime movements. But the Americans even passed the Hague Invasion Act, which allows the president to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of the Netherlands, where The Hague is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody.
The US should be supporting the ICC whole-heartedly; instead, it is not even a member. The Coalition for the International Criminal Court has called the Hague act a "dangerous symbolic opposition to international criminal justice" and Human Rights Watch also condemned the law. The Brookings Institution think-tank says the act "chills U.S. efforts to support the ICC’s work in Ukraine". A European Parliament resolution of July 4, 2002, condemned the act.
So, American support is not a good look for Netanyahu.
Israel has also been repeatedly warned by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which prosecutes nations rather than individuals, about the importance of providing needed humanitarian aid to Gaza. The ICJ issued orders for Israel to make adequate provision of humanitarian supplies, and it is likely to issue similar orders after a hearing last week.
The ICC charge is a measure of how badly Netanyahu has squandered the international sympathy Israel received after the October 7th attack.
“This is a watershed event in the history of international justice,” said Reed Brody, a veteran war crimes prosecutor. “The ICC has never, in over 21 years of existence, indicted a Western official. Indeed, no international tribunal since Nuremberg (against representatives of Nazi Germany) has done so.”
Netanyahu now joins the ranks of Putin in Russia – not something to aspire to. And Netanyahu is being charged with a graver crime than Putin, who only faced war crimes. Netanyahu is also being charged with crimes against humanity.
The upshot of the arrest warrants would be that Netanyahu and Gallant would become wanted men in 124 countries around the world, including almost every major Western nation other than the US.
If they set foot in a state that is party to the ICC’s Rome Statute, the ICC’s founding document, that state would be required to arrest them and submit them for trial in The Hague or any other location of the court’s choosing.
And as noted, Palestine is edging closer to being considered a “state”.
One country that has consistently held to that view has been Norway, which has long experience with the Palestinian conflict situation; Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said “there cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.” Norway was the host site of a solution that came closest to fruition: the Oslo Accords led to a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat.
At the time we were not aware of how close the race was between peace and the current state of war. Few realize how close peace to winning, and in an alternate universe perhaps the war in Afghanistan did not happen, nor the invasion of Iraq. Exactly eight months before their signatures went on the accord, on February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the garage of the World Trade Centre. Kuwaiti-born Ramsey Yousef (real name Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim) was the driver of the explosive-filled truck that tore apart the garage and killed six people. His letter of justification said the act was prompted “in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel…” He was a member of a group called Al Qaeda.
Shortly thereafter, Rabin was killed by an Israeli assassin who detested the idea of peace with Palestinians.
Netanyahu has not changed his view about Palestine since Rabin’s death.
“I destroyed the Oslo agreements. I thought they were a terrible mistake and I still think that,” he said during a press conference Dec. 16. “I am proud of the fact that I prevented the emergence of a Palestinian state.”
He is still intent on carrying out the “digestion” of the remnants of Palestine. His plan for Gaza is to absorb it as an ‘administrative unit’ of Israel. You can see where that is going: it will be eaten away like the West Bank, with Israeli “settlers” encroaching without restraint on the homes and lands of the original inhabitants.
There will be no Palestine.
Yet he has managed affairs so poorly that the UN overwhelmingly supported the bid by Palestine to become a full UN member. The motion was vetoed by the US.
Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir echoed that view: “We will not even allow a statement about a Palestinian state.” His comment came during a provocative visit to a holy site in Jerusalem that is sacred to Jews and Muslims: the Al-Aqsa mosque, aka Temple Mount. It should be recalled that Israeli settler militia once planned to blow up the venerated Muslim shrine known as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem so that Judaism’s ancient temple could be rebuilt on its ruins.
His sentiments were echoed by Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen, who declared “From the River to the Sea, there will only be one state; the state of Israel.”
One of the drivers of the war in fact has been Israel’s Kahanist ideology, a far-right Israeli party that is a Zionist equivalent to the Hindu far right in India. It seeks the most land with the fewest Arabs. Annexation is on their minds. Senior Israeli Minister Ben Gvir and his Jewish Power allied with Religious Zionism to receive over half a million votes in the last election, making it the third-largest in Israel's parliament. Netanyahu is not an official member, but he is in power because he is following their policies.
With their hand on the tiller of Israeli policy, the delivery of a Palestinian state is not going to happen.
By contrast, even Hamas has said that it could agree to an Israeli state on the 1967 lines. I now this statement will seem controversial, but I remember the events: Hamas started as a charitable organization, and Israel rejected truce offerings from Hamas five times, in 1988, 2006, 2008, 2012, and 2017. Gazans have been trapped instead for decades in an Israeli land, sea and air blockade that has crippled their economy and crushed their hopes for the future.
The far-right Zionists have not grasped what Biden has seen: that Hamas cannot be beaten. Hamas is intangible…it is a power that grows in the ruins and thrives in the explosions.
The US is being dragged down into the moral abyss that Netanyahu has created. There were only two countries that voted against a UN motion to make food a right:
You can bet the US would otherwise have had no interest in denying the food issue, unless it was being directed to do so by Israel. Israel is the only country to which food is a threat…to its ability to starve its captives.
And there is no question that Israel is using starvation as a weapon. It has evacuated more than 600,000 Palestinians from the Rafah area over the past week – but sent them to areas where the United Nations says there is no shelter, food, water, sanitation or medical care.
The United States and Britain have backed the idea of an independent Palestinian state, with the proviso that it should come about as part of a negotiated settlement. According to Haaretz, Gazans are pinning their hopes onto the creation of a multinational force that would manage civilian affairs for a limited period, followed by a diplomatic process ultimately resulting in a Palestinian state.
Irish Prime Minister Simon Harris called the joint European declaration an “historic and important day” saying the other countries might join “in the weeks ahead.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez concurred: “This recognition is not against anyone, it is not against the Israeli people. It is an act in favor of peace, justice and moral consistency.”
President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank welcomed the moves toward recognition, saying they would contribute to efforts to bring about a two-state solution.
The Israeli government is now facing widespread distrust unprecedented in time of war, according to columnist Yossi Verter. “This is a malicious government, established to destroy the existing order and to break the nation apart. The most ultra-nationalist, messianic, racist, wasteful, homophobic government Israel has ever had.” Extremist settlers are led by a corrupt, unbridled politician who, to escape from the law, embraced and normalized every zealot from the Israeli margins.
The madness includes the transfer of public money from funds that could be used to rebuild the south, to reinforcement of the ‘settlers’ that illegally occupy Palestinian land.
The strategic trap for Israel is that its goals mandate an endless war. At the same time, the leadership says that its mistakes will only be investigated after the war is over. They supposedly do not engage in politics during wartime, even though in practice Netanyahu is doing so all the time. In the meantime, the group on whose watch the attack occurred is remaining in office.
While more than 30,000 Palestinians lie dead, with tens of thousands more starving.
Netanyahu’s bombing campaign surpasses the destruction of the city of Dresden in WW2, where two years of bombing during World War II destroyed half of the homes in that city and killed about 25,000 people. Gaza has matched this in two months. "Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history," said a U.S. military historian as Israel's use of arms including 2,000-pound "bunker-buster" bombs crush its infrastructure.
Israeli demolition teams rove throughout Gaza blowing up apartment blocks, hospitals and schools.
Political scientist Norm Finkelstein described a 250-page single-space UN report that detailed how Israel took its best snipers, lined them up along the perimeter fence beside a Palestinian festival, and intentionally targeted children, medics, journalists, and disabled people.
Israeli historian Moshe Zimmerman asks: How did it come about that Zionism disappointed and that the Zionist state – or its prophets, from Herzl onward – is incapable of meeting the goals it set for itself?... The Zionist solution is not [really] a solution. We are arriving at a situation in which the Jewish people who live in Zion live in a condition of total insecurity, and not for the first time. Beyond this, we need to take into account that Israel is causing a reduction in the security of Diaspora Jewry, instead of the opposite…"It's clear that the two-state solution needs to be the logical result, even though at the moment it looks hopeless and totally absurd. The alternative is either for us to execute a Nazi-like act against the Palestinians…”
President Biden called for a two-state solution as “the only way to guarantee the long-term security of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people,” He added that this was essential “to make sure Israelis and Palestinians alike can live in equal measures of freedom and dignity. We will not give up on working toward this goal.”
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy says “Israel has become a pariah state more than ever before. Reports from Gaza present a barbaric reality. The world sees it and feels loathing. How could it not? Polls of young people in the United States, including young Jews, should horrify Israel. Hamas is more popular among them than Israel is. We can thank the war for that.”
Then there is this little gem:
Israeli Brig. Gen. (ret.) Dov Tamari has researched and written books and articles critical of the nature of Israel's wars, its intelligence doctrine, and the vulnerabilities of its military. His men put special uranium-powered sensors throughout the Golan Heights during the war with Egypt, contributing greatly to the Israeli success. He noted: "The IDF is good at combat but terrible at war. The troops and the commanders are excellent, but ever since 1967, we have not managed to win any war. This is not just a problem for the military command, but is rather a diplomatic, political, and social problem."
He says that the IDF’s motivation is flawed; that it said Irael’s existence was owed to a vision that it was necessary to expand, all while justifying it by defense, diplomatic, and economic justifications for it. “In this way, they create[d] a subversive culture that aims to constantly exploit any opportunity to accomplish the idea of expanding… the religious want to go back to the days of the Biblical times.
“Spatial nationalism has been decommissioned from the military and moved from the army to political parties. Israel's deterrence doesn't work. Certainly not against a terror organization.
"The Palestinian/Arab/Muslim narrative is more accepted than the Israeli narrative in the world today."
With a majority of nations backing Palestine, and legal courts condemning Israel’s leadership, he appears to have that argument nailed. The question for Israel, is how can it get out of the clutches of the right-wing fanatics and into a narrative line that leads to acceptance of both Israel and Palestine together.
Because whatever it is doing now, is not working.
The Finkelstein Link didn’t give me enough information. Is this what he was referring to?: https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/gaza-s-walking-wounded-israeli-snipers-have-shot-6-392-protesters-in-lower-limbs-this-year-1.800691