Yves here. The idea that the continued extermination in Gaza will generate more terrorism in the West seems entirely logical. I’m actually surprised we have not seen more given that the vividness and level of horror has only increased, along with the frequency of Zionist celebrations of cruelty.
However, this post oddly does not contemplate what would follow.
In the US, given the conflation of criticism of Israel, even by Jewi, with anti-Semitism, terrorism will similarly be conflated with criticism, as in if you engage in the latter, you are promoting the former. So expect more concerted efforts to round up Muslims and boot them out of the US, particularly students. The Trump Administration would if it could set up internment camps for Muslim citizens a la the treatment of the Japanese in World War II. The Trump Administration would similarly use any rise in violence that could be depicted as related to Israel to further clamp down on free speech, engage in intrusive searches, and intimidate journalists. The FBI has taken to showing up a journalists’ doors without a warrant. In this case, the suspect in the Israeli embassy shootings, Elias Rodriguez, was already in custody, so it’s not as if the FBI needed information urgently so as to bring him in.
An additional point is that there is a real possibility of a false flag operation to justify US support of an Israeli attack on Iran. Mind you, expert commentators like Larry Wilkerson have raised this as a possibility, particularly in light of the fact that Israel has strike packages ready to go and is being restrained by Trump, who recognizes that war with Iran would be a seriously bad idea.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers.Originally published at openDemocracy
Conditions for Palestinians are getting progressively worse as Israel’s effort to control Gaza intensifies. Aware that his war can continue only as long as he has the backing of a highly unpredictable US president, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is ramping up efforts to bring the territory under total control as quickly as possible, whatever the human cost.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population of more than two million are now being forced into three small areas, where the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is imposing tight security and limiting the flow of desperately needed food, fuel, medical supplies, and water.
In this context, the murder of two young Israeli Embassy staff, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum last week is especially significant.
Despite the best efforts of the Israeli government’s well-resourced public relations system, Israel has steadily decayed into pariah status across the world as its war on Gaza has intensified. That status will persist until the bombing and killing of Gazans stops, and given the sheer intensity of the current attacks, it will probably grow. Does that mean the Washington attack is a sign of things to come?
We have been here before, especially in the decade after 9/11, when the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sparked scores of attacks on Western targets.
Take, for example, the 7/7 train and bus bombings in London that killed 56 people in July 2005. At the time, prime minister Tony Blair’s government was utterly insistent that the attack had nothing to do with the UK’s involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a stance undermined when it was revealed that one of the bombers had said precisely the opposite in a video recorded before the attacks.
Other attacks carried out in protest of the US-led Western ‘war on terror’ include the bombings of trains in and near Madrid’s Atocha rail terminus in March 2004, killing 191 people, and the targeting of two nightclubs and the US embassy in Bali in October 2002, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Another such attack killed more than 50 people at two synagogues and the British Consulate in Istanbul in 2003, while another targeted US-owned hotels in Jordan’s capital of Amman, killing 60. Similarly, 55 people died when the Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad was bombed in 2008; German tourists lost their lives when a historic synagogue was bombed in Tunisia in 2022; and holiday resorts frequented by Israelis in Egypt and Kenya were attacked in the mid-2000s.
Few if any of the attacks were organised solely by al-Qaida from Afghanistan or Pakistan. Many were organised locally, albeit sometimes involving connections to and no doubt inspiration from al-Qaida.
There was something of a pause on these attacks as the Iraq War eased in the early 2010s, but they resumed amid the four-year US-led air war on ISIS from 2014.
To name just a few of the attacks that took place, mostly across Europe, in the mid-2010s, 130 people lost their lives in a series of coordinated bombings across Paris in November 2015; the following year, a truck was used to kill 86 people and injure hundreds in a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, in the south of France, and 12 died in a similar attack on a Christmas market in Berlin.
So far, there is little direct comparison between these many attacks over two decades and what is happening now in relation to Gaza, but that might be about to change.
This week has seen the start of the US-organised distribution of food in Gaza through the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is run in close association with the IDF and intended to replace the hugely experienced UN organisations that have been distributing aid for decades.
The GHF, a US-backed organisation that was founded in Delaware in February but is based in Geneva, Switzerland, is establishing four major distribution hubs in southern Gaza. It will use these to distribute aid to families that have somehow been screened for any connections to Hamas.
The hubs will be guarded by armed US private security contractors and their locations will do much to enable the relocation of Palestinians to the three small zones determined by the IDF.
In other words, a US-backed organisation employing US security guards is enabling the Israeli government’s plan to clear most of Gaza’s population into what are essentially small holding pens before they can be forcibly relocated overseas.
This has led the GHF’s executive director, Jake Wood, to resign this week. Wood said it had become “clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.
Right across the Middle East, the war in Gaza is commonly seen as an Israeli/US operation, with Washington providing a huge array of weapons and US Army personnel operating radar systems within the country.
After all these years of it not changing anything, these groups mentioned still think attacking the public in various countries will change anything?
Regarding the current events, there comes a point where some people will think that “if it is impossible to change things, if the demise of the Palestinian population cannot be prevented, if we are doomed, then let us at least inflict as much damage as possible to our enemies before we succumb”.
Where I have some doubts about a wave of attacks in foreign countries is that while Al Qaeda and Daech had an ideology, diffused it abundantly via writings, videos, and appeals to a imagined community of true believers, and tried to convert people to it, I do not see the same happening with Palestinians. At best there will be scattered support by isolated individuals like Elias Rodriguez.
Now, if some third power attempted to instrumentalize the Palestinian plight for its own purposes by recruiting, training, arming, and organizing people to commit violent actions in the USA or Europe (like Iran with the Armenian ASALA long ago), then things might become “livelier”…
“Now, if some third power attempted to instrumentalize the Palestinian plight for its own purposes by recruiting, training, arming, and organizing people to commit violent actions in the USA or Europe (like Iran with the Armenian ASALA long ago), then things might become “livelier”…”
I was trying to be more subtle about putting that on people’s minds. Get people to look at things in total and think of how it adds up.
Yasha Levine posted on this yesterday at his Nefarious Russians substack. Very good, and this declaration of empathy is remarkable:
Remember Yoda you should:
“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
And yes, one could have wave this away as being from a 1980’s sci-fi film, but it’s not wrong. People in Gaza have lost everything, yet you expect them to be concerned with pursuing actions that might lead to change?
Not what I’m saying. I was getting at why would they do that when it wouldn’t change anything.
Didn’t say a thing about what they should do.
No need to put words in my mouth.
And read my reply to Vao…who was better at doing any reading between the lines.
Apparently these people don’t understand physics. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
Not only does tamping down on the building pressure only cause it to build and find other ways to express itself, but the effect on those controlling mechanisms is that they become ever more brittle, rigid and disconnected from the underlaying dynamic. Like a scab over a festering wound.
The problem is not only Israel and Gaza, but the West in general, as all moral legitimacy is being lost in Gaza, all political integrity is being shed in Ukraine and the bond markets are starting to look down the road, to the eventual cliff.
The feedback loops have gone negative and are switching into overdrive. Microphone up to the speaker, shriek going parabolic. At some point it all goes super nova.
No Israeli should be safe at anytime, anywhere in the world until they eliminate their own nazis.
That would mean most of their population. Israel is a citizen army. That means nearly everyone has in one way or another contributed directly to the occupation. A point Finkelstein frequently makes.
Latest polls (Penn State) shows 47% of Israeli Jews support killing Palestinians in occupied territories. 82% support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and 56% support ethnic cleansing of Israeli Arabs in general.
What is the basis of the statement “The Trump Administration would if it could set up internment camps for Muslim citizens a la the treatment of the Japanese in World War II.” ?
Is this speculation or can you state clear evidence of this, not based on emotive projection? I am fully aware of the horrific genocide that is happening in Gaza, and the ubiquitous propaganda that westerners are subjected to.
BTW, I am not a Trump supporter, or a supporter of the US Democratic Party.
A search engine is your friend.
There is tons more where that came from.
Let’s not forget the precedent being set with the “Venezuelan gang members” that are being interred in a gulag abroad. Many of which are not gang members or even Venezuelan.
I’m familiar with the internet and mainstream media. Yes, Trump spouts anti-islamic rhetoric. Yes, has backed actions restricting immigration from muslim countries. But that is not the same as setting “up internment camps for Muslim CITIZENS a la the treatment of the Japanese in World War II.” Inflammatory statements like this play into the red/blue rhetoric intended to distract us all.
Oh, it’s Rogers again.
What he doesn’t seem to understand (and I agree with vao above) is that the incidents he relates all came out of a single political process: the militarisation of Islamist thinking in and after the 1980s, stemming from the belief that Muslims, first in Afghanistan and then in Bosnia, were being persecuted and it was necessary to defend them. AQ began as a mechanism for recruiting and transporting young militant Muslims to those conflicts, and many of those who went on to command in Iraq and Syria started there. This led through the stationing of US forces in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan 2 and Iraq, Bin Laden’s theory of the Far Enemy vs the populist IS desire to create the Caliphate like now, the split between them, attacks in Europe up to Yemen and Syria today. This is all set out in shelves of books that Rogers could have read, but the key point is that almost all of these attacks were planned and carried out by networks that don’t exist any more. So the November 2015 Paris massacres involved at least 19 people directly in France and Belgium, and many more along the way, all coordinated from Raqqa by the Military Committee of the IS, made up of former Baathist officers. All that is gone now, and the focus of IS activity has switched westwards to Africa, with some activity in Afghanistan against the government. Again, all this is extensively documented. So occasional acts of violence, possibly, but nothing on the scale of the past.
In any event, bluntly, who cares? From the point of view of the IS, Palestinians aren’t all Muslims and anyway they are apostates because they have agreed to live in a secular state. So no sympathy there. Even if Israel is the ultimate enemy, the Hadith say that the time for the liberation of Jerusalem will be when the armies of the prophet converge on it from (I think) five different directions, and we are not there yet. And I really wonder how much of a pariah status Israel has. Look at many middle-of-the-road internet sites, personal blogs, media sites etc in the West and you find a fairly standard narrative. Yes, it’s terrible, yes people are suffering, but Hamas started it and they are hiding behind civilians and if they only released the hostages all the suffering would be over, but they don’t care about their people they only want to destroy Israel. It doesn’t matter what you and I think, at a very rough and subjective guess, a good half of educated westerners would subscribe to that view, a large part of the rest would would be um and ah, and let’s have a peace initiative, and only a small part (although well-represented here) would be strongly opposed.
In any event, the tactics of the alleged defenders of Palestine haven’t been very effective, because they present themselves as “pro-Palestine” eg pro the PLO, with its image of Arafat, hostage-taking, terrorism etc, rather than “anti-genocide” which is much more difficult to counter. In France we have the same reductive story that Israel peddles, of a “war” between Hamas and the IDF, but this time with Hamas as the good guys, which alienates a lot of potential sympathisers who don’t care for Political Islam. So one way and another there’s less active sympathy for the Palestinians than you would hope, and no climate of general condemnation. So there’s nothing really to radicalise people, and no organisation anyway. Poor Palestinians.
re: “but Hamas started it and they are hiding behind civilians and if they only released the hostages all the suffering would be over”
The above statements seem to require some justification.
1-When did Hamas start “it”?
2-Any statements from Netanyahoo or Ben-Gvir stating that “If they only released the hostages all the suffering would be over”?
Poor Palestinians, indeed!
I oppose ‘ethnic cleansing’. I oppose bombing what amounts to an open city. I oppose shooting children in the head. I oppose mass murder. Were Hamas to release all the living hostages and the bodies of the dead … those not buried under rubble by the bombing … another excuse for continuing the policy of clearing all the residents out of Gaza by whatever means would follow immediately. When the slaughter and displacement from Gaza is complete, the campaign in the West Bank will intensify. Why protest, but no action in Europe? Tender sensibilities. Watching people being starved to death upsets those looking on … and doing nothing? If only it could all be done out of sight. It is so unseemly.
I took the sentence “Yes, it’s terrible … Israel” as being the “fairly standard narrative” Aurelien mentions in the preceding sentence, which is then referred to as “that view” in the following one.
The area is definitely a boiling cauldron and under pressure. Getting a monopoly on oil and gas by stealing it and having suspect allies, is the primary goal of the USA. A bipartisan effort. I believe it is a doomed effort.
Concentration camps are a tried and true tactic. From the days of old with sieges of walled towns, to South Africa against the Boers, and of course by the Germans. Starvation to weaken the populace was used by the British in Ireland twice and India multiple times.
Ineffectual protest does not diminish the effort to protest. Change may take a hundred years.
The USA is not the bastion of freedom. The destruction of the European colonial system during the 1950 – 60’s, was just taken over by the USA. How many dictators have we supported because – communism, social unrest, humanitarian reasons.
This year reminds me of the fall of 1942 and the spring of 1943 in Germany. Hubris is blinding. All is lost and our warlords are striking out in a self destructive manner.
All our warlords have stakes in China. I can see Musk shifting to support China in a few years, and Tim Cook….and taking their money with them. The Arab ‘allies’ can flip at any time.
How many times can we attempt to kill Putin without consequences? This year and in 2014 when MH-17 may have been mistaken for Putin’s plane. This article is concerned with the powerless Palestinians. I do not think the rest of the world is really setting complacently by. Russia understood the situation in 2014 and spent eight years getting ready to take action.
On the home front, I think there will be violence that is not a result of USA foreign policy. Certainly, the pressure on our citizens is unbearable. There is no form yet. Thiel, Musk etc. are doing everything they can to prevent formation of resistance. It will be interesting to watch this all unfold…..and scary.
As a primary player, the UK is still right in the mix.
And the govts and corps will go where the global financiers like BlackRock tell them.
The Shared Mythological History of Israel and the US (w/ Joan Scott) | The Chris Hedges Report
CH and JS discuss Amy Kaplan’s 2018 book:
Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance
Enlightening.
I’ve just requested it from the library.
Did I mention?
Israel delenda est…
Is there any public information regarding the targets in the most recent attack? Was the shooter aware of that they were to embassy staffers or did he just target a random couple?
The death of two is a tragedy.
The deaths of many tens of thousands is a statistic.