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Yahoo
5 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Deadly partnership: US, Israel share blame for Gaza catastrophe
For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly — and differently — making it all possible. On Monday, the Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel released reports concluding that genocide has been underway. Their intervention is significant. According to the New York Times, they are the first such Israeli groups to make this designation. Documenting 'coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,' B'Tselem flatly declared that 'Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.' Many respected legal scholars, political leaders and aid groups are increasingly making the same declaration, as Julian Borger reported Monday in The Guardian. An official declaration has been referred to the International Court of Justice, with some experts predicting a decision in late 2027 or early 2028. The policies of Israel's government, however, still appear aligned with the attitudes of a majority of Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey released by the aChord Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, three-quarters of Jewish Israelis, and 64 percent of all Israelis, said they largely agreed with the statement that 'there are no innocent people in Gaza' — nearly half of whom are children. This week, the Times also noted that 'a majority of Israelis have long wanted a deal that would end the war in exchange for the release of all the hostages still held in Gaza and relieve soldiers exhausted by months of deadly conflict.' But the majority's primary concern is for the well-being of Israelis, with scant regard for the Palestinian people facing slaughter and famine. 'There is no more 'permitted' and 'forbidden' with regard to Israel's evilness toward the Palestinians,' dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 'It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.' The biggest Israeli media outlets, he said, echo and amplify sociopathic voices. 'Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.' Last week, Levy provided an update: 'The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza 'Humanitarian' Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don't manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.' Amid reports and horrific images that have appeared in recent days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said no one in Gaza is starving and denied a 'policy of starvation' on the part of Israel, instead blaming Hamas for the lack of food. His claims about Hamas, however, have been debunked. 'The Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter,' the Times reported last weekend. And in comments on Monday from his golf course in Scotland, even President Donald Trump broke with Netanyahu to acknowledge there was 'real starvation' happening: 'Based on television…those children look very hungry.' Beyond food, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza — bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza's hospitals, Israel is still targeting health care workers — killing at least 70 in May and June — as well as first responders and journalists. The barbarism is in sync with the belief that 'no innocent people' are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika first appeared on Germany's flag: 'The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.' Kristallnacht happened two years later, inaugurating the Nazi regime's organized persecution of Jewish people, which culminated in the Holocaust. Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on 'Democracy Now!' in mid-July that genocide is 'the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn't mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.' Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said: What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it's done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it. A large majority of Israelis — 82 percent, according to a recent poll conducted by Pennsylvania State University — want their government to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza. That displacement would be on a scale even larger than the Nakba, or mass displacement, that occurred in Palestine during the late 1940s. Netanyahu is now moving to fulfill those wishes. 'Netanyahu is expected to propose to the political-security cabinet a plan to annex areas in the Gaza Strip,' Haaretz reported on Monday. 'The process will continue gradually until the entire Strip is annexed. According to details presented by Netanyahu in talks with ministers, the plan has received approval from the Trump administration.' In Israel, 'compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,' Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, 'the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.' The consequences 'are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel's conduct — much less bring it to an end — has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.' The loudest preaching for a 'rules-based order' has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza and America's long war in Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year. Israel's grisly performance as 'a new Sparta' in the region is co-produced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. With at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the U.S., the Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone. Last year, while writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback edition of 'War Made Invisible' — which details how America has shifted to a perpetual state of war — I mulled over the relevance of my book's subtitle: 'How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.' As the carnage in Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part of the same military machine. Their command structures are different, but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath. 'The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past,' longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing and able to go. While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the results of the governments' policies are indistinguishable. American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as June 2024, a CBS News poll found that 61 percent of the public said the U.S. should not 'send weapons and supplies to Israel.' Since then, support for Israel has continued to erode. In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is measurably high. When Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders' bills to cut off some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19 out of 100 senators supported the measures. Very few of his colleagues have voiced anywhere near the extent of Sanders' moral outrage as he keeps speaking out on the Senate floor. In the House, only 26 out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565, a bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain bombs to Israel. 'Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,' the Congressional Research Service reports. During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Brown University's Costs of War project found, the 'U.S. spending on Israel's military operations and related U.S. operations in the region' added up to $23 billion. The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable. So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American leverage in the Middle East — where two-thirds of the world's oil reserves are located. The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the enormous substantive gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the U.S., consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide. The post Deadly partnership: US, Israel share blame for Gaza catastrophe appeared first on
NZ Herald
a day ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Israeli leader found a political window to step up humanitarian aid but remains under intense pressure
His far-right coalition members, who have for months called for a total 'siege' of Gaza and eventual Israeli reoccupation of the strip, have vowed to vote down a truce deal to end the fighting. But for now, they have been outmanoeuvred. Itamar Ben Gvir, one of the two far-right politicians excluded from the security cabinet meeting, said in a radio interview that the decision to pause Israeli military fighting during daylight hours and allow land and air deliveries of food parcels into the battered enclave was done 'deliberately' without him and that Netanyahu's people 'told me old wives' tales about them not wanting me to violate the Sabbath'. More than two-thirds of Jewish Israelis said last month they opposed increasing humanitarian aid into Gaza, according to a poll published by the Israel Democracy Institute. The poll was taken before international concerns over hunger in Gaza spiked over the past month. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called the easing of aid delivery restrictions into Gaza 'a good strategic move, which we should not detail further'. Smotrich's statement suggested that the policy change could be temporary, with Netanyahu himself saying that a 'tactical pause in fighting' and entry of 'minimal' amounts of aid into Gaza did not contradict ongoing combat to help achieve Israel's two war aims of eliminating Hamas and freeing the 50 remaining hostages, of which 20 are presumed to remain alive. Political analysts said that in shifting Israel's aid policy on Gaza, Netanyahu is continuing his longtime tactic of buying time rather than committing to strategic decisions. Yaki Dayan, former Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, said that even the Trump Administration is getting 'fed up' with the lack of a firm decision. 'Time is running out,' Dayan said. 'You can't stay in this stasis that we're in now, with the international pressure increasing all the time. So the US is saying, either go for a full deal, or go for conquest of Gaza, both options that we will support, but we want to see a decision made.' Netanyahu faces these choices as national elections, scheduled for next year, grow closer. Though he saw a brief spike in popular support following Israel's 12-day war with Iran last month, poll numbers show that he could face difficulties cobbling together another ruling coalition. Much of the right-wing base is outraged over the management of the Gaza war and its failure to deliver on the Prime Minister's promise to eliminate Hamas. At the same time, polls show that most Israelis support a negotiated truce with Hamas that would bring the hostages home, even if this meant Israeli troops would withdraw from Gaza and give up the military advantage they have by controlling vast swathes of the enclave. Dissatisfaction with Netanyahu is also growing as the number of Israeli soldiers killed rises. Hamas ambushes and other guerrilla tactics have brought this death toll to 898, the highest in decades. Thousands of reservist soldiers have been called up to serve on Israel's various fronts, for hundreds of days. Many Israelis view the hostages as the top priority and prefer that Israel's leaders use economic, diplomatic, or other levers of influence to oust Hamas 'that do not require troops to be sitting inside Gaza', said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a non-partisan think-tank based in Jerusalem. He said that Netanyahu, who is even facing growing pressure from the Israel Defence Forces to reach a hostage deal, 'is manoeuvring, as the most skilled and seasoned political practitioner in the country', while looking ahead to the elections slated for 2026. 'Netanyahu has three months of political calm, and then we are coming closer to an election,' Plesner said. 'There is a growing realisation that the war the way it's conducted is not moving us forward to either of the war goals.' Netanyahu's governing coalition is already teetering. Earlier this month, two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties quit the coalition because Netanyahu had not enshrined into law the long-standing military exemption afforded their community, stripping his Government of its parliamentary majority. Netanyahu's Government now has only 50 of the 120 Knesset seats, challenging his ability to pass legislation or chart a new wartime strategy. 'Now that the coalition is already on the verge of collapsing, Netanyahu has about three months to do whatever he wants before he has to gather all the coalition partners again and decide whether to dissolve the Knesset and go for early elections or try to survive another year,' said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist from Hebrew University. Either way, she said, he will need to change course of Gaza. 'He has no room left to manoeuvre,' Talshir said. 'He has to finish the war in Gaza.'
NDTV
18-07-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
Why Netanyahu Government Is On The Verge Of Collapse And How He Can Save It
Tel Aviv: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government is on the brink of collapse. Israel's two ultra-Orthodox parties - United Torah Judaism (UTJ) and Shas - have announced plans to leave Netanyahu's coalition. They are demanding to pass a law that would continue exempting the ultra-Orthodox Israelis from military conscription-- a proposal that is fiercely opposed by Netanyahu's own Likud party, among other coalition members. The UTJ legislators have already submitted their resignations on Monday, while those of Shas are openly threatening to follow suit. With both ultra-Orthodox parties likely on the way out, Netanyahu's coalition faces an unstable parliamentary majority with just 50 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. But that does not mean elections are around the corner. Why The Two Parties Are Threatening To Quit For over a decade, the ultra-Orthodox have supported Netanyahu even as the Israeli public turned on him. In return, the Prime Minister would give generous government subsidies to ultra-Orthodox institutions. He also protected the community from Israel's military draft, which mandated Jewish Israelis to serve in the Israel Defence Forces. Young ultra-Orthodox men were exempted from the rule and instead paid to study religious texts. The arrangement has received backlash before, but the Hamas October 7 attack changed the scene, with the Supreme Court last year ordering an end to the exemption. Now, the ultra-Orthodox parties are trying to push for a new bill, but a consensus couldn't be reached for far. Why Netanyahu's Government Is Safe For Now For now, UTJ and Shas don't seem to be in a hurry to force Netanyahu out of government. They appear to be using the threat of exit as leverage to force Netanyahu's hand on the matter. Announcing their decision to quit, Shaa left the door for compromise open. They asked the lawmakers to enact a law in favour of ultra-Orthodox students "as soon as possible and no later than the opening of the Knesset winter session, so that it will be possible to maintain the existence of the government and the coalition partnership," according to a report by The Times of Israel. The Knesset is set to go for a three-month recess on July 27. This gives Netanyahu ample time to try to resolve the crisis behind closed doors, while the government continue to function in a reduced capacity until late October, without facing immediate legislative challenges or no-confidence votes. Netanyahu's Other Challenges Soon after Shas's decided to leave Netanyahu's coalition, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid said Israel's "illegitimate" government has no authority to make crucial decisions. "A minority government cannot send soldiers to battle. A minority government cannot decide who will live and who will die. A minority government cannot decide the fate of Gaza, reach arrangements with Syria or Saudi Arabia. It cannot continue to transfer billions to the corrupt and the military draft dodgers at the expense of taxpayers," Lapid said. He called for elections, which are currently due in late 2026. Now, whenever that contest takes place, Netanyahu is likely to face the steepest political challenge of his career. He managed to survive the last election on a technicality in Israel's electoral system after his coalition received just 48.4 per cent of the vote. But since April 2023, no amount of success against Hamas, Hezbollah or Tehran seems to be helping the coalition win polls and alienating his closest allies may not work in his favour.
Atlantic
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
The Wheels are Falling Off Netanyahu's Government
Outside of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu appears ascendant. After the Israeli leader inflicted heavy losses on Iran last month, The New York Times dubbed the apparent victory his 'political resurrection' and 'the culmination of a hard-fought comeback from the lowest point in his long political career.' Inside Israel, however, the reality could not be more different. As has been the case for more than two years, polls continue to show that Netanyahu's coalition would lose the next election, were it to be held today. And this week, his government lost two of its parties, effectively leaving it with control of just 50 of the Israeli Parliament's 120 seats. The result: Netanyahu now sits atop a de facto minority government that is no longer able to legislate, and Israel is careening toward new elections, most likely in early 2026. The reason for this unraveling is twofold. To maintain his grip on power, despite his personal unpopularity and ongoing corruption trial, Netanyahu has relied upon two constituencies: the ultra-Orthodox religious parties (which hold 18 seats) and the far-right ultranationalist parties (which hold 14 seats). Both of these groups support policies at odds with the views of the Israeli majority, and both are now at odds with Netanyahu. For more than a decade, the ultra-Orthodox have backed Netanyahu even as many Israelis have turned on him. In exchange, the prime minister has provided generous state subsidies to ultra-Orthodox institutions and protected the community from Israel's military draft: Whereas most Jewish Israelis serve in the Israel Defense Forces, most young ultra-Orthodox men are instead paid by the government to study religious texts. This arrangement has been profoundly unpopular even among Netanyahu's voters but was tolerated during peacetime as a necessary concession for continued right-wing governance. Since October 7, that tolerance has collapsed. Faced with an open-ended, multifront war, Israel is in desperate need of more manpower and can no longer countenance exempting the ultra-Orthodox—the country's fastest-growing demographic—from military service. Many Israelis, including those on the right, have become incensed by what they perceive as a lack of social solidarity from the ultra-Orthodox community, whose members have largely continued to go about their daily lives even as their neighbors have been forced to leave their families and businesses to fight Israel's wars. The Israeli supreme court has also ruled that the ultra-Orthodox carve-out violates the principle of equality under the law, tasking the legislature with instituting a fairer regime. This popular outcry, coupled with Netanyahu's political dependence on the ultra-Orthodox, has put the prime minister in a vise: He can either continue exempting the ultra-Orthodox and anger not just the public and the courts but also his own party, or revoke that exemption and lose the ultra-Orthodox—and with them, his coalition. Of late, Netanyahu has attempted to fudge the issue by pushing through legislation that would create a technical process for drafting the ultra-Orthodox but in practice make the new requirements easy to evade. This effort has met resistance in his party, however, and the bill has not passed—leading to the departure of the ultra-Orthodox parties from the government this week. For now, those parties have said that they won't vote to force new elections, giving Netanyahu time to try to appease them. But unless he can figure out a way to pass a bill that somehow satisfies the ultra-Orthodox and their critics, it's merely a matter of time before his erstwhile allies completely switch sides. And that's not Netanyahu's only problem. He is also facing threats of secession from his far-right partners, who are fundamentally opposed to ending the war in Gaza, because they seek to ethnically cleanse the enclave and populate it with Jewish settlements. Most Israelis oppose this far-right fever dream and support a deal that would end the war in exchange for the release of hostages. But as with military exemptions for the ultra-Orthodox, Netanyahu here is beholden to a radical minority whose votes keep him in power. At the same time, the Israeli leader is under growing pressure from President Donald Trump to end the Gaza war, once again putting him in an impossible position. If Netanyahu doesn't strike a deal, he risks alienating the U.S. president; if he does, he is likely to lose one or both of the far-right parties in his government. Given these proliferating threats to his position, Netanyahu has been doing what he does best: playing for time. The summer recess for Israel's Parliament begins on July 27 and extends through the Jewish holidays, until late October. During that time, the Parliament cannot vote to dissolve itself, and so it would be hard for lawmakers to compel new elections. Netanyahu could reach a cease-fire in Gaza, for example, and the far-right would not be able to immediately bring down the coalition. The prime minister just has to run out the clock until the end of the month, and then he will have space either to get all of his partners back on his side—an unlikely prospect—or to make moves that upset his coalition but put him in a better position for the election that would be called upon the Parliament's return. Whenever that contest does happen—most likely around January—Netanyahu will face arguably the steepest political challenge of his career. Last election, his coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote, attaining a parliamentary majority only because of a technicality in Israel's electoral system. That coalition has been losing in the polls since April 2023, and no amount of success against Hezbollah or Tehran has altered the trajectory. Thanks to his campaign in Iran, Netanyahu may be in his strongest position since the catastrophe of October 7. But after alienating so many of his allies and the majority of the Israeli people, that still might not be enough.
LeMonde
16-07-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
Netanyahu loses majority as second ultra-Orthodox party quits coalition
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suffered a major political blow on Wednesday, July 16, with a key governing partner announcing it was quitting his coalition government, leaving him with a minority in parliament as the country faces a litany of challenges. Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party that has long served as kingmaker in Israeli politics, announced it was quitting over Netanyahu's failure to pass a law on military draft exemptions – the second ultra-Orthodox governing party to do so this week. Military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, and the issue of exemptions has long divided the country. Those rifts have only widened since the start of the war in Gaza as demand for military manpower has grown and hundreds of soldiers have been killed. But Shas said it would not undermine Netanyahu's coalition from the outside and could vote with it on some legislation, granting Netanyahu a lifeline in what would otherwise make governing almost impossible and put his lengthy rule at risk. Once their resignations come into effect, Netanyahu's coalition will have 50 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Once Shas' resignations are put forward, there's a 48-hour window before they become official, which gives the Israeli leader a chance to salvage his government. The party's announcement also comes just before lawmakers recess for the summer, granting Netanyahu several months of little to no legislative activity to bring the parties back into the fold. The political instability comes at a pivotal time for Israel, which is negotiating with Hamas on the terms for a U.S.-backed ceasefire proposal for Gaza. Shas' decision isn't expected to derail the talks. But with a fracturing coalition, Netanyahu will feel more pressure to appease his other governing allies, especially the influential far-right flank, which oppose ending the 21-month war in Gaza so long as Hamas remains intact.
