Latest news with #ethnicCleansing
Irish Times
29-06-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Sanctions against individual settlers are hopelessly inadequate. The real settler organisation is Israel
Global attention has shifted away from Gaza during the two weeks of the Israel-Iran war – a collateral benefit from Israel's point of view, no doubt. But with or without the world watching, Israel's daily killing of starving Palestinians in Gaza never stopped. And now, with hints of the possible expansion of the Abraham Accords , Israel would be delighted to once again draw attention away from the carnage it continues to inflict on Gaza's civilian population. Such a regional expansion would serve to advance another key goal of the accords: to spell out to Palestinians how Israel can look past them, not towards Ramallah or Rafah, but towards Abu Dhabi and – ideally – Riyadh. Israel's strategic gaze remains the same: skip over those erased Palestinians in order to look towards deal-making in the Gulf and beyond. Of course, the violent, state-sanctioned erasure is not limited to Gaza. Almost daily pogroms against a defenceless Palestinian population in the West Bank have resulted – for now – in the ethnic cleansing of an area 'larger than the entire Gaza Strip'. And the violence continues. Yet even amid all the bloodshed and destruction, Palestinians are not erased. They are right here – and still they comprise half of the people living between the river and the sea. The future of Israelis and Palestinians – just like our present and past – is here. That is the reality that must be addressed. READ MORE All this is well known. And all this, staggeringly, is not only tolerated but in fact underwritten by Europe through various partnerships with Israel, chief among them the EU-Israel association agreement. The agreement – supposedly 'based on respect for human rights and democratic principles' – has just now gone through an ever-so-belated 'review'. Its conclusion? That '[t]here are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations.' The resulting action on behalf of the EU? None. Every new day of European inaction is a day in which Europe articulates a clear message to Israelis. What is that message? That the EU is fine (bar the occasional lip service) with what Israel is doing to Palestinians; that the killings and oppression are in fact greenlighted to continue by Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Dublin. For sure, the EU may not have the leverage to make it all stop. But it at least has the basic obligation not to be part of it, not to underwrite it, not to be continuously complicit in it. And it has a considerable measure of genuine leverage. [ What gives Ursula von der Leyen the right to egg Binyamin Netanyahu on with his killing crusades? Opens in new window ] That kind of leverage – which is perhaps what French President Emmanuel Macron meant when recently speaking of 'concrete measures' – has rarely been used to counteract Israeli state violence. In recent years a modest wave of personal sanctions against 'violent settlers' has emerged – and is clearly a step in the right direction. The most recent announcement, earlier in June, by the UK and others of personal sanctions against two Israeli ministers – Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir – is yet another such step forward. Further steps could now follow – if not at EU level then from individual states or ad-hoc, like-minded, alignments. But personal sanctions, to date, have demonstrably failed to stop either the violence itself or the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators. The logic at the core of sanctioning individual settlers – or some of their political leaders – has been flawed from the get-go. Settlements, and all the violence, dispossession and loss of Palestinian land and livelihood that comes with them, are not a project of a few individual settlers, nor of Israel's extreme political right. They are an Israeli state project – a violent one – backed for decades by all Israeli governments through decisions, policy, funding, planning and military might. As such, the review – and suspension – of the trade agreement with the EU could have served as the appropriate level at which Israeli policies are to be addressed. Acting effectively against these Israeli policies would certainly be met by a predictable Israeli response: accusations of 'anti-Semitism' and 'BDS' per the usual script. Yet a suspension of the agreement – or similar action at the appropriate government level – would amount to neither. Instead it would simply be the outcome of Israel's own undermining of its international obligations, flowing directly from Israel's criminal and cruel policies. To impact Israeli policies, you must impact Israel. Not a specific settler nor even a specific settler organisation: for the real 'settler organisation' is the state of Israel itself. Hagai El-Ad is a writer based in Jerusalem
Bloomberg
01-06-2025
- General
- Bloomberg
Chile's Boric Vows to Rely Less on Israel, Citing Gaza Violence
Chile President Gabriel Boric vowed to diversify his nation's defense ties to depend less on Israel, issuing a scathing rebuke over violence in Gaza during his annual State of the Nation address on Sunday. In denouncing what he called the Israeli government's 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' of Palestinians, Boric said he will also seek quick passage of a bill to ban imports from territories that the Middle Eastern country has illegally occupied.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
MSF doctor: Aid entering Gaza 'woefully' inadequate
Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar found out Israeli strikes killed nine of her children as they she was working in one of the few hospitals still standing. The tragedy unfolded as aid is still being heavily restricted in Gaza. Dr. Aqsa Durrani of Doctors Without Borders joins MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin, Catherine Rampell and Antonia Hylton to discuss what she calls an 'ethnic cleansing plan' in Gaza.
Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Why does only Trump care about the killing of white South Africans?
Last week, Donald Trump confronted Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, and accused his country of a 'genocide' against white farmers. Fact-checkers swung into action: wrong on all counts! Whites make up about seven per cent of the population and less than two per cent of murder victims. The clear majority of those killed on farms are black. Trump uses the word genocide lightly and cynically. But then it's always been surprisingly elastic. You might think 'genocide' means an attempt to physically exterminate an entire people, as in the Holocaust, but the United Nations applies it to either the whole or part of a community; persecution can be physical or mental; and it might be achieved by creating intolerable conditions. White South Africans feel the latter point definitely applies to them – given recent laws that discriminate in employment and make it easier to seize their land – so why are their claims not being heard more sympathetically? Either 'lived experience' matters or it does not. Well, one feature of our culture of subjectivity is a tendency towards double-standard. We care deeply, but we pick and choose what we care about. Governments were notoriously slow to identify the genocide of Christians in Africa; ethnic cleansing in Sudan or Azerbaijan will never get a shout-out at Eurovision. By contrast, Israel is routinely accused of genocide – as is Britain, for its former empire, or Commonwealth countries vis-à-vis indigenous peoples. White South Africans are thus the latest in a long line of minorities to demand their day in court, and telling them 'a lot of other people are getting murdered in South Africa as well' is not quite the slam dunk that the defence seems to think. Indeed there was something distasteful about the speed by which fact-checkers 'proved' that the whites to whom Trump has granted asylum are mistaken – people, remember, who say they are fleeing for their lives. The affair, wrote one journalist, is treated by South Africans as a 'joke'. Is the same humour on show when grown men pose as children to get asylum in the UK? No, and it shouldn't be: the principle of asylum is that we take a claim seriously till it is disproved. Perhaps white South Africans have exaggerated the threat to their community, but it's odd that the first instinct of so many Westerners is to diminish or ironise what we would normally say isn't very funny. In 2020, in a case that resulted in violent protests, farm manager Brendin Horner was tied to a pole, stabbed and strangled to death. He was just 21 years old. No doubt some commentators harbour the view that if bad stuff happens to white South Africans, they 'have it coming' given what went on under apartheid. It is undeniably true that when the racist regime died, whites lost political power yet retained economic dominance. They still control three quarters of private land. South Africa would have benefited from a two-party, class-based politics that tussled between capitalist and social democratic responses to inequality. What it got was a single-party crime syndicate called the African National Congress, which, through theft and incompetence, has left 33 per cent of its beloved people unemployed. In 2023, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported a queer fact: 'South Africa now exports more copper than its mines produce.' How is this possible? Locals steal it and sell it on the black market. They strip it out of railway lines and power cables, even from the wiring in hospitals. The result of such decay? The rise of small parties espousing anti-white sentiment under the guise of socialism. In 2024, nearly 10 per cent of South Africans voted for the Economic Freedom Fighters – a Marxist party whose leader, Julius Malema, famously sang 'Kill the Boer'. If some whites want out, it's because they can see where things are going. They leave one racial powder keg for another. Trump has attempted to put a ban on global asylum seekers while accepting a handful of whites whose peril is disputed – an obviously racist policy that exploits the Right-wing backlash against Black Lives Matter. The Maga crowd thinks: 'Americans used to say all lives matter, then the Democrats decided that black lives actually matter more. So, here comes the correction. We shall say, 'white lives matter, too', and restore balance to the force.' Very often, Trump doesn't correct the liberal zeitgeist so much as he appropriates, inverts and exaggerates it. The Left wants a fight about race? Fine: he'll declare war and drop an A-bomb. Borders are closed, critical race theory is banned in schools. I get why liberals hate Trump for this, but it's frustrating that they cannot see their own part in fuelling the phenomenon – that he exploits the moral confusion they have sown in public life. The post-Holocaust, post-Civil Rights ideal was that society would try its level best to be colour-blind. It was a myth, yes; but a good myth. The Left chose to blow it up. Patriotic meritocracy was replaced with grievance, redistribution, anti-racism. As identity becomes a factor in our politics, groups scrabble for champions, and Trump offers himself to whites. In a sense, we are all South African now: in America, and in Britain, the state is no longer seen as a neutral referee but a castle to capture. Among the chattering classes, universalist principles – the old 'thou shalt nots' applied to all with no caveats – are replaced with a hierarchy of suffering (causes to endorse, causes to ignore) that masks the revival of ancient prejudices and animosities. Have you noticed a growing ambiguity around killing? The word 'but' trails behind death like a shady lawyer. Over a thousand Jews were killed on October 7, but Israel is occupying Arab land. Nine children were killed in an Israeli strike on Gaza, but Hamas started the war. George Floyd was killed by a cop, but he did buy a pack of smokes with a counterfeit bill. And whites are killed on farms, but so are black people. Plus these Afrikaners are so difficult! Plus I read on a website that you have to understand the context… There might be no greater insult than being told to keep a murder in perspective, yet this is precisely what moral sophisticates are doing. I offer an alternative. Let us call all murder a sin and respect its victims, whatever their race or religion.
Arab News
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Netanyahu's ‘relocation' agenda and a silent world's complicity
A long-buried nightmare has clawed its way back to the heart of Israeli far-right politics. This delusion refuses to fade, no matter how many times it has been condemned, debunked or disguised in diplomatic rhetoric. It is the old vision of 'transfer,' a sterilized label for a dark, decades-old objective: the forced removal of Palestinians from their land. What was once a fringe ideology has now become mainstream policy, championed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's increasingly radical and emboldened coalition. The vocabulary may have changed, but the intent remains the same: to ethnically engineer the landscape of Palestine and reshape its demography under the pretext of security and national interest. But there is nothing secure about driving a population into statelessness. There is nothing legitimate about starving a people, demolishing their homes and denying them the right to exist on their own land. In Gaza, this doctrine has been weaponized into policy. With every missile strike, every decimated neighborhood and every hospital overwhelmed with the injured and dying, the outlines of this grotesque vision become clearer. Israeli leaders talk openly of 'voluntary migration,' while simultaneously making Gaza unlivable. This is not policy — it is premeditated displacement. It amounts to ethnic cleansing. The evidence is not just in UN reports or press releases — it is in the images seared into the global conscience Hani Hazaimeh The humanitarian toll is staggering. According to the Arab League, the death toll from Israel's military campaign in Gaza has risen to more than 52,500, with injuries surpassing 118,000 since October 2023. The majority of the victims are women and children. Thousands more remain buried under rubble, uncounted and unnamed. Hospitals have been bombed, schools obliterated and entire families annihilated in their homes. The burned bodies of children, charred beyond recognition, are not collateral damage — they are the physical remnants of a doctrine that sees Palestinian existence as expendable. No one can claim ignorance. The evidence is not just in UN reports or press releases — it is in the images seared into the global conscience. A mother clutching the lifeless bodies of her twins. A paramedic breaking down after pulling his daughter's corpse from the wreckage. Rows of white-shrouded bodies, lined up in makeshift morgues or open fields because cemeteries are full. This is a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions. And yet, the world's most powerful nations continue to offer cover for Israel's actions. The US, the EU and others have failed not only morally but strategically, emboldening a regime that is now openly toying with the idea of permanent population removal — an idea once considered politically radioactive but now disturbingly palatable in some circles. This is a humanitarian catastrophe. And yet, the world's most powerful nations continue to offer cover for Israel's actions Hani Hazaimeh Israel's far-right ministers speak of a 'solution' that requires Palestinians to leave, to be absorbed by Egypt, Jordan or anywhere else but here. It is the logic of colonialism reanimated in the 21st century. It is not just an attack on Gaza — it is an assault on international law, human dignity and the very idea that people have a right to their homeland. The Palestinian cause is not just about politics — it is about humanity. It is about a people denied the right to live in peace, to raise their children without fear, to mourn their dead without hearing the roar of jets overhead. The dream of a two-state solution fades further with each airstrike, replaced by a nightmare of perpetual occupation and suffering. The international community must wake up to the reality that what is happening in Gaza is not a war — it is a campaign of forced disappearance. This is genocide under a different name, carried out with digital precision and bureaucratic coldness. And behind it stands a political fantasy resurrected from the darkest corners of Israeli settler ideology. The question now is not whether we see what is happening. It is whether we are willing to act. Because history has a long memory. It will remember who stood for justice — and who watched silently as an entire people were driven into the abyss.
