NewzIntel.com

Category: Benjamin Netanyahu

  • MIL-Evening Report: Phil Goff: Israel doesn’t care how many innocent people it’s killing in Gaza

    COMMENTARY: By Phil Goff

    “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

    This statement was made not by a foreign or liberal critic of Israel but by the former Prime Minister and former senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Ehud Olmet.

    Nightly, we witness live-streamed evidence of the truth of his statement — lethargic and gaunt children dying of malnutrition, a bereaved doctor and mother of 10 children, nine of them killed by an Israeli strike (and her husband, another doctor, died later), 15 emergency ambulance workers gunned down by the IDF as they tried to help others injured by bombs, despite their identity being clear.

    Statistics reflect the scale of the horror imposed on Palestinians who are overwhelmingly civilians — 54,000 killed, 121,000 maimed and injured. Over 17,000 of these are children.

    This can no longer be excused as regrettable collateral damage from targeted attacks on Hamas.

    Israel simply doesn’t care about the impact of its military attacks on civilians and how many innocent people and children it is killing.

    Its willingness to block all humanitarian aid- food, water, medical supplies, from Gaza demonstrates further its willingness to make mass punishment and starvation a means to achieve its ends. Both are war crimes.

    Influenced by the right wing extremists in the Coalition cabinet, like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s goal is no longer self defence or justifiable retaliation against Hamas terrorists.

    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Making life unbearable
    The Israeli government policy is focused on making life unbearable for Palestinians and seeking to remove them from their homeland. In this, they are openly encouraged by President Trump who has publicly and repeatedly endorsed deporting the Palestinian population so that the Gaza could be made into a “Middle East Riviera”.

    This is not the once progressive pioneer Israel, led by people who had faced the Nazi Holocaust and were fighting for the right to a place where they could determine their own future and be safe.

    Sadly, a country of people who were themselves long victims of oppression is now guilty of oppressing and committing genocide against others.

    New Zealand recently joined 23 other countries calling out Israel and demanding a full supply of foreign aid be allowed into Gaza.

    Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Israel’s actions “ intolerable”. He said that we had “had enough and were running out of patience and hearing excuses”.

    While speaking out might make us feel better, words are not enough. Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza are being increased, aid distribution which has restarted is grossly insufficient to stop hunger and human suffering and Palestinians are being herded into confined areas described as humanitarian zones but which are still subject to bombardment.

    People living in tents in schools and hospitals are being slaughtered.

    World must force Israel to stop
    Like Putin, Israel will not end its killing and oppression unless the world forces it to. The US has the power but will not do this.

    The sanctions Trump has imposed are not on Israel’s leaders but on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) who dared to find Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes.

    New Zealand’s foreign policy has traditionally involved working with like-minded countries, often small nations like us. Two of these, Ireland and Sweden, are seeking to impose sanctions on Israel.

    Both are members of the European Union which makes up a third of Israel’s global trade. If the EU decides to act, sanctions imposed by it would have a big impact on Israel.

    These sanctions should be both on trade and against individuals.

    New Zealand has imposed sanctions on a small number of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank where there is evidence of them using violence against Palestinian villagers.

    These sanctions should be extended to Israel’s political leadership and New Zealand could take a lead in doing this. We should not be influenced by concern that by taking a stand we might offend US president Donald Trump.

    Show our preparedness to uphold values
    In the way that we have been proud of in the past, we should as a small but fiercely independent country show our preparedness to uphold our own values and act against gross abuse of human rights and flagrant disregard for international law.

    We should be working with others through the United Nations General Assembly to maximise political pressure on Israel to stop the ongoing killing of innocent civilians.

    Moral outrage at what Israel is doing has to be backed by taking action with others to force the Israeli government to end the killing, destruction, mass punishment and deliberate starvation of Palestinians including their children.

    An American doctor working at a Gaza hospital reported that in the last five weeks he had worked on dozens of badly injured children but not a single combatant.

    He noted that as well as being maimed and disfigured by bombing, many of the children were also suffering from malnutrition. Children were dying from wounds that they could recover from but there were not the supplies needed to treat them.

    Protest is not enough. We need to act.

    Phil Goff is Aotearoa New Zealand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This article was first published by the Stuff website and is republished with the permission of the author.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Jeremy Rose: Mister Netanyahu have you no sense of decency?

    Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. –

    COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose

    The word antisemitism has become so debased that depending on who is using it I might well take it as a sign that the accused is worth listening to.

    When the World Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest, he responded by saying the court was being antisemitic. One of the court’s legal advisers was Theodor Meron, a former Israeli ambassador and legal adviser who spent a chunk of his childhood in a Nazi concentration camp.

    Last month, Netanyahu declared the leaders of France, the UK and Canada of fuelling antisemitism.

    Their “crime”? Threatening “concrete action” against Israel if it continues its “egregious” blockade of aid entering Gaza.

    Egregious not genocidal. And the concrete action referred to wasn’t sanctions or a full arms embargo but stalling free trade talks.

    The bitter irony is that with none of those countries having yet imposed a complete ban on arms exports to Israel they are all in a sense fuelling a genocide.

    The Army-McCarthy hearings
    We’re coming up to the 71st anniversary of the Army-McCarthy hearings where an army lawyer, Joseph Welch, rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with the famous line: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

    We’ll be waiting a long time for the wanted war criminal Netanyahu to show any decency, but could we be approaching a tipping point where the establishment finally calls off a witch hunt after realising no one is safe from false accusations.

    The McCarthyite red scare, which began in the late 1940s, saw more than 2000 federal workers sacked, thousands of academics, teachers, and union members pressured or forced to resign due to anti-communist policies, and up to 500 Hollywood directors and actors blacklisted for being leftwing or refusing to name names.

    Welch’s rebuke was triggered by none of that. It was McCarthy turning his metaphorical guns onto the military implying he would expose high ranking army personnel that saw the army lawyer return fire.

    The conflating of criticism of Israel with antisemitism has been spectacularly successful in making any criticism of Israel a potentially career ending move. Three Ivy League presidents have been pushed out of their jobs for failing to crack down hard enough on students protesting the brutality of Israel’s ongoing genocide.

    UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose popularity had seen the party become the biggest political movement in Europe, was toppled in 2016 after bogus accusations of antisemitism.

    In the purge of the Labour Party that followed Jews were five times more likely to be investigated for antisemitism than goys.

    It’s the same story in Germany where Jews feature prominently among those cancelled for alleged antisemitism. Renowned professor of Jewish studies Peter Schäfe was forced to resign as the director of Berlin’s Jewish Museum after it retweeted a post critical of Germany’s anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) resolutions.

    Greece’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis — not a Jew — has been banned from Germany or even appearing via Zoom for this response, on 8 October 2023, to being asked if he condemned Hamas:

    “I condemn every single atrocity, whomever is the perpetrator or the victim. What I do not condemn is armed resistance to an apartheid system designed as part of a slow-burning, but inexorable, ethnic cleansing programme.
    As a European, it is important to refrain from condemning either the Israelis or the Palestinians when it is us, Europeans, who have caused this never-ending tragedy: after practising rabid anti-Semitism for centuries, leading up to the uniquely vile Holocaust, we have been complicit for decades with the slow genocide of Palestinians, as if two wrongs make one right.”

    That nuanced response, with its acknowledgement of the dreadful legacy of real antisemitism, has not only seen him banned from speaking — in person or virtually — but dropped by his German publisher.

    Antisemitism is often referred to as the oldest hatred — with good reason — but the word itself is relatively recent.

    A ‘scientific’ word for an old hatred
    Nineteenth century German journalist, Wilhelm Marr, popularised the term in a pamphlet the title of which translates as: The way to victory of Germanism over Judaism.

    What distinguished antisemitism from the commonly used Judenhass — or Jewish hate — was the idea that it was a Jew’s race not their religion that was deserving of hate.

    Antisemitism was a prejudice proud to speak its name. It was respectable in a way that religious intolerance wasn’t. Prominent professors and politicians happily declared themselves antisemites and adherents of “scientific racism”.

    It was an old idea dressed up in new clothing. Fifteenth century Spain passed Limpieza de Sangre (cleanliness of blood) statutes to allow discrimination against Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity.

    The Judeo-Christian civilisational conflict with Islam, often referred to by right-wing supporters of Israel, is a relatively new construct. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, the Ottomans sent ships to take them to new homes in Istanbul, Thessaloniki and Izmer.

    Times change and while it was once possible — even common — to be a respectable antisemite and scientific racist but frowned upon to discriminate based on religious belief, now the reverse is true.

    So-called new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins declare all religions bad but Islam worse.

    “Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great mediaeval cathedrals. So much nicer than the aggressive sounding “Allahu Akhbar.” Or is that just my cultural upbringing?” Dawkins once tweeted.

    The cultures of Europe have indeed cultivated racist ideas for centuries. And just as half a millennia ago conversion offered you no protection from the racism of the Spanish court, embracing Buddhism didn’t protect Columbia University student Moshen Mahdawi from being snatched from a naturalisation interview by balaclava-clad ICE agents.

    His crime? Being Palestinian and telling his story.

    It’s a topsy-turvy world where life-long anti-fascists like Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis are sanctioned on bogus claims of antisemitism while the likes of Elon Musk and Hungarian PM Victor Orban — both peddlers of old-style antisemitic conspiracies — are welcomed to Israel as friends and allies in a contrived battle of civilisations.

    One thing that differentiates antisemitism from the Judeophobia, which has been a European disease since the early days of Christianity, is that it places Jews among the victims of the continent’s white supremacist legacy.

    It’s perhaps no coincidence the Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas in the same year, 1492, that Spain expelled its Jews and Muslims.

    The settler colonisation of the Americas has been estimated by historian David Stannard to have resulted in the death of 100 million indigenous people — many from introduced diseases but tens of millions also died in genocides only recently making their way into history books.

    Last month, when Netanyahu declared Israel’s attacks on Gaza “a war against human beasts” he was echoing the words of settler colonialists from Alaska to Aotearoa and the dehumanising language of the Nazis against the Jews.

    So, back to that question about whether we’ve reached a tipping point where unfair accusations of antisemitism will be seen in a similar light to McCarthy’s red scare.

    With Netanyahu accusing the leader of the Democrats party, Yair Golan, an IDF reserve major-general, of promoting a blood libel for speaking out against the starving of babies in Gaza, it’s hard not to draw parallels with the Army-McCarthy hearings.

    It’s worth quoting the words that saw Israel’s PM accuse Golan of a blood libel — a reference to the lie that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish children in the baking of matzos, and a trigger for centuries of pogroms.

    “A sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population.”

    The idea that an IDF general speaking out against the killing of babies is propagating racist hatred of Jews is surely a leap too far even for many fervent Zionists.

    Another sign that the tide might be turning is Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, saying the US administration’s weaponisation of the IHRA definition is making academics and students (including Jews) less safe.

    The self-described Zionist said the definition was being distorted and used to silence anti-Israel critics.

    The IHRA working definition has been widely adopted internationally — including by institutions in New Zealand and Australia.

    Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both criticised the definition claiming it has seen those documenting Israel’s human rights abuses being falsely accused of antisemitism.

    It’s a tragedy that weaponised accusations of antisemitism aimed at protecting Israel from criticism are obscuring a rise in Judeophobic conspiracy theories and attacks on Jewish community centres and synagogues around the world.

    And even more tragically that those accusations are blunting criticisms of Israel that could help bring the ongoing genocide in Gaza to an end.

    Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist. He has a Substack: Towards democracy

    This article was first published on Café Pacific.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Phil Goff: Israel doesn’t care how many innocent people, children it’s killing

    COMMENTARY: By Phil Goff

    “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians. It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.”

    This statement was made not by a foreign or liberal critic of Israel but by the former Prime Minister and former senior member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, Ehud Olmet.

    Nightly, we witness live-streamed evidence of the truth of his statement — lethargic and gaunt children dying of malnutrition, a bereaved doctor and mother of 10 children, nine of them killed by an Israeli strike (and her husband, another doctor, died later), 15 emergency ambulance workers gunned down by the IDF as they tried to help others injured by bombs, despite their identity being clear.

    Statistics reflect the scale of the horror imposed on Palestinians who are overwhelmingly civilians — 54,000 killed, 121,000 maimed and injured. Over 17,000 of these are children.

    This can no longer be excused as regrettable collateral damage from targeted attacks on Hamas.

    Israel simply doesn’t care about the impact of its military attacks on civilians and how many innocent people and children it is killing.

    Its willingness to block all humanitarian aid- food, water, medical supplies, from Gaza demonstrates further its willingness to make mass punishment and starvation a means to achieve its ends. Both are war crimes.

    Influenced by the right wing extremists in the Coalition cabinet, like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s goal is no longer self defence or justifiable retaliation against Hamas terrorists.

    Israel attacks Palestinians at US-backed aid hubs in Gaza, killing 36. Image: AJ screenshot APR

    Making life unbearable
    The Israeli government policy is focused on making life unbearable for Palestinians and seeking to remove them from their homeland. In this, they are openly encouraged by President Trump who has publicly and repeatedly endorsed deporting the Palestinian population so that the Gaza could be made into a “Middle East Riviera”.

    This is not the once progressive pioneer Israel, led by people who had faced the Nazi Holocaust and were fighting for the right to a place where they could determine their own future and be safe.

    Sadly, a country of people who were themselves long victims of oppression is now guilty of oppressing and committing genocide against others.

    New Zealand recently joined 23 other countries calling out Israel and demanding a full supply of foreign aid be allowed into Gaza.

    Foreign Minister Winston Peters called Israel’s actions “ intolerable”. He said that we had “had enough and were running out of patience and hearing excuses”.

    While speaking out might make us feel better, words are not enough. Israel’s attacks on the civilian population in Gaza are being increased, aid distribution which has restarted is grossly insufficient to stop hunger and human suffering and Palestinians are being herded into confined areas described as humanitarian zones but which are still subject to bombardment.

    People living in tents in schools and hospitals are being slaughtered.

    World must force Israel to stop
    Like Putin, Israel will not end its killing and oppression unless the world forces it to. The US has the power but will not do this.

    The sanctions Trump has imposed are not on Israel’s leaders but on judges in the International Criminal Court (ICC) who dared to find Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu guilty of war crimes.

    New Zealand’s foreign policy has traditionally involved working with like-minded countries, often small nations like us. Two of these, Ireland and Sweden, are seeking to impose sanctions on Israel.

    Both are members of the European Union which makes up a third of Israel’s global trade. If the EU decides to act, sanctions imposed by it would have a big impact on Israel.

    These sanctions should be both on trade and against individuals.

    New Zealand has imposed sanctions on a small number of extremist Jewish settlers on the West Bank where there is evidence of them using violence against Palestinian villagers.

    These sanctions should be extended to Israel’s political leadership and New Zealand could take a lead in doing this. We should not be influenced by concern that by taking a stand we might offend US president Donald Trump.

    Show our preparedness to uphold values
    In the way that we have been proud of in the past, we should as a small but fiercely independent country show our preparedness to uphold our own values and act against gross abuse of human rights and flagrant disregard for international law.

    We should be working with others through the United Nations General Assembly to maximise political pressure on Israel to stop the ongoing killing of innocent civilians.

    Moral outrage at what Israel is doing has to be backed by taking action with others to force the Israeli government to end the killing, destruction, mass punishment and deliberate starvation of Palestinians including their children.

    An American doctor working at a Gaza hospital reported that in the last five weeks he had worked on dozens of badly injured children but not a single combatant.

    He noted that as well as being maimed and disfigured by bombing, many of the children were also suffering from malnutrition. Children were dying from wounds that they could recover from but there were not the supplies needed to treat them.

    Protest is not enough. We need to act.

    Phil Goff is Aotearoa New Zealand’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This article was first published by the Stuff website and is republished with the permission of the author.

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –