It is thought to be the biggest set of demonstrations since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Thousands gathered in Tel Aviv to demand that the extremist government of Binyamin Netanyahu strike a deal to exchange Palestinians held prisoner in Israel (many of them held without charge or trial) for hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich appears to have spoken for the government last week when he said that rescuing the over 100 hostages “is not the most important thing.”

The police also pushed back a crowd attempting to block the Ayalon Lanes intercity freeway at Tel Aviv.

Elsewhere in the city, thousands gathered, among them families with a member held hostage in Gaza. They raised placards demanding an exchange-of-prisoners deal and the release of Israeli hostages.

At the residence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the Tzahala neighborhood of Tel Aviv, hundreds came out to demand immediate elections. Netanyahu is widely hated in Israel, and only 17% in polls say they would vote for his Likud Party again.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel anti-govt protests: Demonstrators call for an early election”

Numerous other towns and cities also witnessed demonstrations.

A similar small rally for new elections was held in Beersheba.

In Jerusalem, about a thousand people participated in a protest march, also demanding a hostage deal, as well as new elections. They proceeded from the prime minister’s residence to Paris Square.

Hundreds also protested at Caesarea, closing the main drag and edging toward a residence in the city owned by Netanyahu. Police detained a woman for investigation.

Haaretz adds that the protesters in Tel Aviv were carrying torches and marching toward the Defense Headquarters when the water cannon was unleashed on them. The center-left newspaper quotes a protest leader as saying, “The police created this mess. The number of protesters was not greater than in previous weeks. When they activated the water cannon … they turned it into a significant event that drew people.”

MSNBC Video: Israeli Hostage speaks out against Netanyahu: “‘They just left us there to die’: Israeli hostage held in Gaza shares experience

Haaretz also says that of the 400 demonstrators in Beersheba, 100 were family members of two Israelis of Palestinian heritage (presumably Druze) who were being held in Gaza. It reports, “Shaban al-Sayed, the father of Hisham al-Sayed, who has been held by Hamas since 2015, and Ali Alziadna, the brother of Yosef Alziadna, who is currently being held hostage by Hamas, and uncle of released hostage Bilal Alziadna, spoke at the protest.”

Haaretz also quotes a family member of a hostage at a small demonstration in Haifa as saying that the Netanyahu government and its “deranged messianic envoys” are making enemies of the families of the hostages.

Huge weekly demonstrations against the Netanyahu government had roiled Israel before the Hamas attack.

Also on the horizon, blazing like an infernal nightmare, is the prospect of an escalation of the current war in Gaza and the spread of destabilizing violence to every corner of the Middle East.

The direction that the region takes could be determined by a feat of imaginative diplomacy. Or an act of murderous stupidity.

Which will it be?

The Widening War

The United States still maintains 40,000 troops across dozens of military bases in the Middle East. Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel invaded Gaza in response, these U.S. facilities and allied forces have sustained over 160 attacks. A number of militias in the region have demonstrated their solidarity with Hamas by attacking Israel across the Lebanese border (Hezbollah), U.S., British, and Israeli ships in the Red Sea (Houthis), and U.S. bases in the region (Iran-allied militias in Iraq and Syria).

Last month, an attack on one such base, Tower 22 in Jordan, left three Americans dead. The Biden administration blamed Iran for the attack. Since Tower 22 is a key node in the coordination of U.S. attacks on Iran-aligned militias, it was a logical target. Responding in part to pressure from its more hawkish critics in Congress, the administration retaliated by launching attacks on 85 sites in Iraq and Syria that are linked to Iran.

Iran’s “axis of resistance” links up a number of groups that have different ideologies, religious beliefs, and positions within their own societies. Israel’s invasion of Gaza has given this constellation of forces a new focus and a new cohesion.

Hezbollah, with 40,000 fighters, is perhaps the most significant, given that its political wing has dominated Lebanese politics. After October 7, Israel and Hezbollah have traded attacks across the border. Most recently, Hezbollah launched drone attacks in northern Israel and Israel responded by destroying weapons depots deep in Lebanese territory. The key to preventing a wider war in the region is negotiating some kind of agreement between the Israeli government and Hezbollah.

The United States has also retaliated against the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, through which 12 percent of global trade passes. These retaliatory strikes don’t seem to have had much effect on the Houthis’ resolve. This weekend, they struck a ship operating under the flag of Belize and also knocked out a U.S. drone. The Houthis enjoy the advantage that real estate agents always talk about: location, location, location. They’ve already caused a dip in the global economy as ships have begun to reroute around South Africa, adding time and cost to shipments of oil and other commodities.

In Iraq, several pro-Iranian militias emerged from the wreckage caused by the U.S. invasion in 2003, including the Popular Mobilization Forces and Kata’ib Hezbollah. Although there is overlap, the former has effectively become part of the Iraqi army while the latter has joined with other groups to form an umbrella organization unaffiliated with the Iraqi government called Islamic Resistance in Iraq. They all want the remaining U.S. troops out of their country.

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Israel launches fresh airstrikes on Rafah in southern Gaza”

And they are all incensed by the war in Gaza.

Israel has defied international law and even common sense by continuing to prosecute its war against Hamas and killing nearly 30,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children. It’s not exactly news that Israel is ignoring considerations of human rights and basic morality in its destruction and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian community. What’s different this time is the failure of the Netanyahu government to put the lives of Israeli hostages first and pursue negotiations for their release.

Approximately 130 of the original 253 hostages that Hamas and related organizations seized in Israel on October 7 remain in Gaza. Hamas released 105 in an exchange and four others unilaterally. Israel rescued three and killed three others in a botched rescue attempt. In addition, at least 30 of the 130 remaining hostages are believed to be dead. These hostages are the only real bargaining chip that Hamas has.

Grand Bargain

With negotiations over a ceasefire stalemated in Egypt, the Netanyahu government is planning to launch a new offensive on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. The United States, basically pleading with its obdurate ally not to attack Rafah, has gone so far as to support for the first time a UN initiative for a temporary pause in fighting (even as Washington continues to reject resolutions calling for an “immediate ceasefire”).

Hamas has proposed a 150-day ceasefire that turns into a permanent truce, a prisoner exchange that would release thousands of detained Palestinians, and an Israeli military withdrawal from Gaza. Netanyahu has dismissed this proposal as “delusional.” He doesn’t want to promise a troop withdrawal. And he insists on a ratio of three Palestinian prisoners released for each hostage.

If the details can be worked out—and there’s no guarantee that Netanyahu in particular will budge—this kind of ceasefire could serve as the keystone of a grand bargain in the region.

Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, has been racing around the capitals of the Middle East to build support for an audacious plan. It looks roughly like this: Saudi Arabia extends diplomatic recognition to Israel and the world comes together to support a new Palestinian state. In effect, Blinken is trying to reignite the Abraham Accords that Jared Kushner started during the Trump administration, but linking Saudi recognition of Israel to a two-state solution rather than simply a cash payout to the Palestinians. According to Axios, “There are several options for U.S. action on this issue, including: Bilaterally recognizing the state of Palestine; not using its veto to block the UN Security Council from admitting Palestine as a full UN member state; encouraging other countries to recognize Palestine.”

You might think that the spoiler in this scenario would be Iran. After all, Tehran has activated its “axis of resistance” in support of Hamas. It has never been coy about its opposition to Israel. And it’s not exactly been cozy with the United States either.

But Iran is actually not the spoiler.

In recent days, the Iranian government has been trying to rein in its allies’ militias in Iraq. Though not all of these forces agree, there have been no attacks on U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria since February 4.

This restraint is not just about avoiding a direct conflict with the United States. Iran’s position on Israel has been evolving as well. Even though the Iranian leadership continues to lambaste Netanyahu and his colleagues, it has moved toward embracing a two-state solution. Explains Javad Heiran-Nia at Stimson:

The Iranian position has been that Israel is illegitimate and that a future state should be determined through a referendum of Palestine’s pre-1948 inhabitants and their descendants. However, Iran has been trying not to be isolated in the Islamic world and recognizes that other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey are likely to play a bigger role in diplomacy and reconstruction following the Gaza war. In addition, there are divisions among Iranian Shi’ite clerics about Palestine, with some members of the Qom Seminary supporting a two-state solution. Former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, himself a senior cleric, has said that Iran would accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel if the elected Hamas government chose this path.

Another key part of this evolution was, courtesy of China’s diplomatic efforts, a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia last spring. The longstanding Saudi-Iranian feud, which is both confessional and geostrategic, came to a head recently in the war in Yemen, with Tehran and Riyadh supporting separate proxies in the conflict. That war has large subsided, though talks to bring a formal end to the conflict have stalled. Nevertheless, Iran and Saudi Arabia seem willing to negotiate modest agreements of mutual benefit.

When the elephants are no longer fighting, the grass has a chance to regrow.

Remaining Challenges

Netanyahu has promised to launch the assault on Rafah by the start of Ramadan if the remaining Israeli hostages are not released. Ramadan begins on March 10.

Three weeks is not a lot of time to pull together a grand bargain or even a minor agreement. Barring such an agreement, however, the opportunities for murderous stupidity multiply.

Getting Netanyahu to agree to anything is not easy. But he seems to believe that bringing home the remaining hostages can salvage his tattered reputation. The dismal track record of the Israeli military rescuing those hostages should push him in the direction of a ceasefire and a prisoner exchange. But Netanyahu still has the Entebbe model in his head, the daring rescue of hijacked airline passengers in Uganda in 1976 (the only casualty among the Israeli commandos was Netanyahu’s brother). Without the element of surprise on its side, Israel is not likely to repeat the Entebbe model in an assault on Rafah.

Preventing such an attack on Rafah will be challenging enough. The larger deal that could bring about a Palestinian state faces even longer odds.

Netanyahu has made it clear that his vision of Gaza’s future is as an occupied territory, administered by Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers have eaten away at what might constitute the core of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. That doesn’t leave a whole lot left for an independent state, particularly a non-contiguous one. Meanwhile, Israel has generally insisted that any Palestinian entity can’t have a military. And, because Netanyahu’s government has vowed to eliminate Hamas, it would be difficult to imagine Israel tolerating a role for organization in such an entity.

Which means that a Palestinian state at this point would have to be something of a sleight of hand. The leadership would have to include some representation from Hamas—given its current popularity among Palestinians—but those representatives would probably have to “disconnect” from Hamas. The state would lack such requirements of a state as a military, but it could have bodies like a domestic security force that could one day become an army. There would have to be some “land for peace” arrangement that provides the new state with enough contiguous territory to ensure viability. And Jerusalem would become something of a Brussels shared by the two states.

Ironically it has become easier to get Iran and Saudi Arabia to agree than to expect Netanyahu and Hamas to come to some understanding. There’s no waving of a magic wand to replace the leadership of Israel and the Palestinians with more accommodating leaders. The best scenario is to achieve some reduction of tensions, some release of hostages, some stepping away from the brink of a wider war. With a reduction in tensions comes the possibility of new elections in Israel and the emergence of new leadership in Palestine.

The world waits. Never has the risk of a wider war been greater. Never has the need for imaginative diplomacy been so urgent.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

They pointed to the obligations laid on states by the Third Geneva Convention to ensure respect for the law: “States, whether neutral, allied or enemy, must do everything reasonably in their power to ensure respect for the Conventions by others that are Party to a conflict. This duty to ensure respect by others comprises both a negative and a positive obligation. Under the negative obligation, High Contracting Parties may neither encourage, nor aid or assist in violations of the Conventions by Parties to a conflict. Under the positive obligation, they must do everything reasonably in their power to prevent and bring such violations to an end.”

They also called for a halt to all transfers of arms to Hamas.

The joint statement said, “All States must ‘ensure respect’ for international humanitarian law by parties to an armed conflict, as required by 1949 Geneva Conventions and customary international law. States must accordingly refrain from transferring any weapon or ammunition – or parts for them – if it is expected, given the facts or past patterns of behaviour, that they would be used to violate international law.”

The experts added, “Such transfers are prohibited even if the exporting State does not intend the arms to be used in violation of the law – or does not know with certainty that they would be used in such a way – as long as there is a clear risk.”

They slammed private arms manufacturers as well, saying “They have not publicly demonstrated the heightened human rights due diligence required of them and accordingly risk complicity in violations.”

As for states, they observed, “International law does not enforce itself. All States must not be complicit in international crimes through arms transfers. They must do their part to urgently end the unrelenting humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

They cited approvingly the decision of an appeals court in the Netherlands forbidding the export to Israel from that country of spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet. A Dutch news site quoted Judge Bas Boele as saying, “It is undeniable that there is a clear risk that the exported F-35 parts are used in serious violations of international humanitarian law.” I also noted that the NL Times added that the court said, “Israel does not take sufficient account of the consequences of its attacks for the civilian population. Israel’s attacks on Gaza have resulted in a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, including thousands of children.”

They noted that the Dutch court of appeals pointed to indiscriminate bombing, the destruction of 60% of civilian homes, damage to hospitals, schools, mosques and other facilities, the displacement of 85% of the population, and the very high civilian death toll as indications that Israel is violating the laws of war.

The experts also pointed to the January 26 preliminary injunction against Israel by the International Court of Justice, which found the genocide case lodged against Tel Aviv by South Africa to be plausible and ordered that acts that constitute genocide under international law be halted by Israel.

They said, “The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then. This necessitates halting arms exports in the present circumstances.”

The 1948 Genocide Convention forbids countries from exporting arms into a situation where it is plausible that genocide is taking place.

The experts said, “State officials involved in arms exports may be individually criminally liable for aiding and abetting any war crimes, crimes against humanity or acts of genocide. All States under the principle of universal jurisdiction, and the International Criminal Court, may be able to investigate and prosecute such crimes.”

Israel’s main arms suppliers since October have been The United States, Germany, France, Britain, Canada and Australia. The experts are saying that the politicians and military men making these arms transfers to Israel could end up being prosecuted for complicity in war crimes, including the crime of genocide.

TRT World Video: “Israeli air strikes kill at least 104 people in Gaza in 24 hours”

Some countries have already halted arms shipments to Israel. They include not only the Netherlands but also Spain, Belgium’s Walloon regional government and Italy. The OHCHR says they lauded the Japanese company Itochu Corporation, as well, for ceasing exports to Israel.

The experts noted an obligation on UN member states to uphold international humanitarian law and urged that states take the following steps with Israel:

Diplomatic dialogue and protests;

– Technical assistance to promote compliance and accountability;

– Sanctions on trade, finance, travel, technology or cooperation;

– Referral to the Security Council and the General Assembly;

– Proceedings at the International Court of Justice;

– Support for investigations by the International Criminal Court or other international legal mechanisms;

– National criminal investigations using universal jurisdiction and civil suits; and

– Requesting a meeting of the parties to the Geneva Conventions.

Note that the ICJ proceedings have already been initiated. The Security Council has three times voted to impose a ceasefire, but the Biden administration vetoed it in each case. The General Assembly has also voted for a ceasefire but has no executive power.

The OHCHR press release listed the experts:

Ben Saul, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism; Margaret Satterthwaite, Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers; Cecilia M. Bailliet, Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity; Claudia Mahler, Independent Expert on the enjoyment of all human rights by older persons; Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education; Livingstone Sewanyana, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order; Surya Deva, Special Rapporteur on the right to development; Attiya Waris, Independent Expert on foreign debt, other international financial obligations and human rights; Ashwini K.P., Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance; Olivier De Schutter, Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights; Paula Gaviria Betancur, Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons; Siobhán Mullally, Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children; Tomoya Obokata, Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, including its causes and consequences; Carlos Salazar Couto (Chair-Rapporteur), Sorcha MacLeod, Jovana Jezdimirovic Ranito, Chris M. A. Kwaja, Ravindran Daniel, Working Group on the use of mercenaries; Robert McCorquodale (Chair-Rapporteur), Fernanda Hopenhaym (Vice-Chair), Pichamon Yeophantong, Damilola Olawuyi, Elzbieta Karska, Working Group on business and human rights; Barbara G. Reynolds (Chair), Dominique Day, Bina D’Costa, Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent; Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing; Dorothy Estrada Tanck (Chair), Claudia Flores, Ivana Krstić, Haina Lu, and Laura Nyirinkindi, Working group on discrimination against women and girls; and Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences; Fabián Salvioli, Special Rapporteur on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence.

The statement is endorsed by: Aua Baldé (Chair-Rapporteur), Gabriella Citroni (Vice-Chair), Angkhana Neelapaijit, Grażyna Baranowska, Ana Lorena Delgadillo Perez, Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances; Mary Lawlor, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders; Nicolas Levrat, Special Rapporteur on minority issues; and David R. Boyd, Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment.

The Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organisation and serve in their individual capacity.

Yet, as any student of history, let alone a diplomat, will testify, conflicts between nations cannot be understood, let alone resolved, without an understanding of their historical roots. Could this also be true of the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians?

The roots of this conflict are often explained with reference to establishment of Israel in 1948, including as it did, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland as well as the killing of thousands more. Although the Zionists who founded Israel were for the most part Labor socialists and often secular-minded, the civil war in which the British Mandate of Palestine collapsed brought out a nationalistic tribalism among the newly minted Israelis. That tribalism among the Zionists was further reinforced by the Nazi mass genocide of Jews in Europe during WW II, i.e., the Holocaust.  Ironically, the Jewish tribalism of the Zionist paramilitaries in late British Palestine also impelled Palestinian and Arab tribalism. Despite the ethical universalism of the Qur’an and Islamic values, extremist Muslim groups have in recent decades become seduced by modern notions of ethnic nationalism, veering into a tribalism of their own, in the face of colonialism and neocolonialism.

A struggle within Judaism between universalism and tribalism can be traced much, much further back, however. This is the time of the author(s) of Second Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament. Among other things, Second Isaiah teaches the universal existence of God, i.e., not just the God of the Jews but of the whole world. It further contains numerous exhortations to ethical behavior and social justice. Ethical behavior includes such things as caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing justice, and treating others with compassion. 

This means that the author(s) of Second Isaiah were one of a small group of religious reformers of the Axial Age, a period given its name by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jaspers identified the Axial Age as a worldwide transformation of religious consciousness that lasted from roughly between 800-200 BCE centered in the Mediterranean, India, and China. Overall, its key features included a new emphasis on ethical living, individual introspection, and universal principles.

“The Axial Age,” Digital: Dream/ Mystical, Juan Cole prompts, 2024

By comparison, the multiple religions of the world’s peoples prior to the Axial Age, including Judaism, were tribal in nature, i.e., focused on what was good for the tribe as a whole rather than the individual tribal member, much less on what was good for those outside of the tribe. While tribes typically spoke of themselves as the “people” those outside of the tribe were regarded with disdain if not fear, as a potential enemy that, when necessary, had to be destroyed in order to ensure the survival of the tribe.

It is attractive, but mistaken, to assume that in the aftermath of the Axial Age after 200 BCE, the old tribal-centric religions, typically described as animistic in character, simply atrophied and disappeared. However, as many subsequent wars have demonstrated, that is not the case. When a tribe, now called a nation, comes under threat, whether real or perceived, the populace of that nation reverts to a tribal mentality if not a tribal morality, i.e., only we are human, the ‘other’ is not. The universal deity is returned, albeit unconsciously, to his/her status as a tribal deity concerned exclusively with the welfare of the tribe. Once tribalized, the deity goes on to bless and protect the tribe, and only the tribe, assuring them of victory. As for the treatment of the tribe’s enemy, anything goes.

In the case of the current conflict in Israel/Palestine this age-old paradigm is all too clear. Thus, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not hesitate to invoke the Biblical image of the Jewish tribal battle against the Amalekites. He claimed Israelis were united in their fight against Hamas, whom he described as an enemy of incomparable cruelty. “They [Israeli Jews] are committed to completely eliminating this evil from the world,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew and then added: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

Netanyahu’s reference was to the first Book of Samuel in which God commands King Saul to kill every person in Amalek, a rival tribe to the ancient Israelites. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” (1 Samuel 15:3)

Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claimed that “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” While Gallant may have initially been referring to Hamas fighters, he went on to call for the collective punishment of all Palestinians in Gaza, stating, “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

The tribal nature of Netanyahu and Gallant’s comments could not be clearer, just as their dismissal of the shared humanity of Israelis and Palestinians alike. It should be underlined that they are members of the secular Likud Party, so that despite their appeal to the Hebrew Bible, they are not exemplifying Judaic values. Stripped of any religious conscience, their naked tribalism became astonishingly cruel.

Yet, at the same time there are Jews, including in Israel, who recognize their shared humanity with Palestinians.  Admittedly in Israel itself, groups like “We Stand Together” are numerically few in number. However, among Jews outside of Israel, groups like “Jewish Voices for Peace” and “Not in Our Name” number in the many thousands. These groups are supported by leading Jewish intellectuals like Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Noam Chomsky, Avi Shlaim, Miko Piled and Ilan Pappe. While it is common to describe these groups and individuals as “left-wing” or “progressive,” their stances are not so much political as they are a continued recognition of the universal Judaic values of caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing justice, and treating others with compassionate based on their shared humanity.   

At this point readers may be thinking, if this analysis is correct, it certainly doesn’t apply to adherents of Judaism only.  Don’t all of today’s major religions teach recognition of our shared humanity, the need to be compassionate to others, i.e., some version of ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’?  In response, I would certainly agree they do. We are fortunate indeed that all of today’s major religions share these basic values at least doctrinally. But what of the historical practice of these religions?

William Blake, “The prophet Isaiah,” from Isaiah, liii, 7-12; seated figure with right arm raised.” c.1821″ British Museum, Museum number 1940,1012.1

While limitations of space don’t allow me to go into detail, let me give but one example that has particular relevance to the current situation in Israel/Palestine. I refer to the role played by “Manifest Destiny” in American history. First coined in 1845, this term represented a collective mindset that viewed the expansion of the US as both necessary and ordained by God. As the US gained more territory, proponents of Manifest Destiny used it to justify the forced removal, enslavement, and even elimination of Native American tribes, as well as the expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories.

I suggest the tribal mindset of Christians of European heritage that was manifested in Manifest Destiny is similar to the far-right Zionist commitment to the forced removal and/or elimination of the Palestinian people as part of the current, extremist Israeli government’s drive to create Greater Israel, which it sees as comprising all the lands promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible.

Compare these actions with the words that both Christians and Jews claim to believe in as contained in the book of Leviticus 19:33-34: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

What is one to make of the vast difference between the practice of many Christians and Jews in comparison with the teachings they both claim to believe in? Should their practice be regarded as simple hypocrisy, i.e., do as I say, not as I do? And were there space, I could give similar historical examples from all the major religions of the world. Hypocrites all?

I suggest not. Instead, I point to what is as yet an unresolved split in all religions, i.e., between their tribal heritage, based on tens of thousands of years of past history, versus their Axial-period awakening of less than three thousand years ago. This awakening was of profound importance in that it led to a recognition of the universal nature of their teachings based on their shared humanity. This in turn led to a feeling of mutual compassion in which others are recognized as extensions of themselves, extensions who have the same human needs and fears as they themselves.

Although the present conflict in Israel/Palestine may yet claim untold thousands of lives, at some point it will end, at least this time around. It is safe to say, however, that the battle for the soul of Judaism will continue on. The battle, that is, between those the sort of Judaism that sees itself  in other peoples versus the kind that retains a tribal mentality in which its own well-being is the predominate if not exclusive concern. Inevitably this dichotomy will lead to further hostilities in the future and yet more bloodshed, possibly even among Jews themselves.

At the same time, we already see the emergence of groups like the Jewish Voices for Peace and Stand Together that show the universal values of the Axial age being increasing embraced, especially by young Jews living outside of Israel and even some inside of the country. Which side will prevail remains to be seen.

Yet, it is critically important for non-Jews not to assume this is a conflict that only involves the Jewish people. As recorded history all too graphically reveals, the struggle between a narrow tribal mentality versus a universal mentality truly accepting of the other, is one that transcends all ethnic, racial, national, and even religious, boundaries. In the US, the slogan “America First!” is currently embraced by millions, demonstrating that the tribal mentality remains firmly in place.   Likewise, we have seen the recrudescence of a narrow Hindu tribalism in India, which betrays the Axial Age ethical universalism of Buddhism and the Upanishads.    

As brutal and destructive as religion-endorsed tribal warfare was in the past, humanity as a whole was endangered. Today, however, things have changed, not simply because of the very real possibility of nuclear-induced “mutual assured destruction” but because of the ever-increasing dangers resulting from phenomena like global warming. None of the problems increasingly facing humankind as a whole can be solved by one or even a group of nations. They require concerted the efforts, including necessary sacrifices, of all nations and peoples of the world.

Thus, the question of “the battle for the soul of Judaism” is, in fact, the same battle that adherents of all the world’s religions face and even of those who identify with no faith. Adherents of Islam face the same dilemma. That is to say, can we homo sapiens collectively awake to, and transcend, the historical practices associated with our tribalized pasts or are we bound to continue to fool ourselves into believing that we are pursuing universal truths even as we betray such truths in practice. Thus, the battle for the soul of Judaism is in reality the common struggle of all who believe in human equality and dignity, now encompassing even the very survival of the human species.

Imagine you share an Instagram post about an upcoming protest, but none of your hundreds of followers like it. Are none of your friends interested in it? Or have you been shadow banned?

Social media can be useful for political activists hoping to share information, calls to action and messages of solidarity. But throughout Israel’s war on Gaza, social media users have suspected they are being censored through “shadow banning” for sharing content about Palestine.

Shadow banning describes loss of visibility, low engagement and poor account growth on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). Users who believe they are shadow banned suspect platforms may be demoting or not recommending their content and profiles to the main discovery feeds. People are not notified of shadow banning: all they see is the poor engagement they are getting.

Human Rights Watch, an international human rights advocacy non-governmental organisation, has recently documented what it calls “systemic censorship” of Palestine content on Facebook and Instagram. After several accusations of shadow banning, Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent company) argued the issue was due to a “bug” and “had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content”.

I have been observing shadow bans both as a researcher and social media user since 2019. In addition to my work as an academic, I am a pole dancer and pole dance instructor. Instagram directly apologised to me and other pole dancers in 2019, saying they blocked a number of the hashtags we use “in error”. Based on my own experience, I conducted and published one of the very first academic studies on this practice.

Why platforms shadow ban

Content moderation is usually automated – carried out by algorithms and artificial intelligence. These systems may also, inadvertently or by design, pick up “borderline” controversial content when moderating at scale.

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

Most platforms are based in the US and govern even global content according to US law and values. Shadow banning is a case in point, typically targeting sex work, nudity and sexual expression prohibited by platforms’ community guidelines.

Moderation of nudity and sexuality has become more stringent since 2018, after the introduction of two US laws, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (Fosta) and Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (Sesta), that aimed to crack down on online sex trafficking.

The laws followed campaigns by anti-pornography coalitions and made online platforms legally liable for enabling sex trafficking (a crime) and sex work (a job). Fearing legal action, platforms began over-censoring any content featuring nudity and sexuality around the world, including of legal sex work, to avoid breaching Fosta-Sesta.

Although censorship of nudity and sex work is heralded as a means to protect children and victims of non-consensual image sharing, it can have serious consequences for the livelihoods and wellbeing of sex workers and adult content creators, as well as for freedom of expression.

Platforms’ responses to these laws should have been a warning about what was to come for political speech.

Social media users reported conversations and information about Black Lives Matter protests were shadowbanned in 2020. Now journalistic, activist and fact-checking content about Palestine also appears to be affected by this censorship technique.

Platforms are unlikely to admit to a shadow ban or bias in their content moderation. But their stringent moderation of terrorism and violent content may be leading to posts about Palestine that is neither incitement to violence nor terror-related getting caught in censorship’s net.

How I proved I was shadow banned

For most social media users, shadow banning is difficult to prove. But as a researcher and a former social media manager, I was able to show it was happening to me.

As my passion for pole dancing (and posts about it) grew, I kept a record of my reach and follower numbers over several years. While my skills were improving and my follower count was growing, I noticed my posts were receiving fewer views. This decline came shortly after Fosta-Sesta was approved.

It wasn’t just me. Other pole dancers noticed that content from our favourite dancers was no longer appearing in our Instagram discovery feeds. Shadowbanning appeared to also apply to swathes of pole-dancing-related hashtags.

I was also able to show that when content surrounding one hashtag is censored, algorithms restrict similar content and words. This is one reason why some creators use “algospeak” editing content to trick the algorithm into not picking up words it would normally censor, as seen in anti-vaccine content throughout the pandemic.

Check if you are being shadow banned

TikTok and Twitter do not notify users that their account is shadow banned, but, as of 2022, Instagram does. By checking your “account status” in the app’s settings, you can see if your content has been marked as “non-recommendable” due to potential violations of Instagram’s content rules. This is also noticeable if other users have to type your full profile name for you to appear in search. In short, you are harder to find. In August 2023, X owner Elon Musk said that the company was working on a way for users to see if they had been affected by shadow bans, but no such function has been introduced. (The Conversation has contacted X for comment.)

The ability to see and appeal a shadow ban are positive changes, but mainly a cosmetic tweak to a freedom of expression problem that mostly targets marginalised groups. While Instagram may now be disclosing their decisions, the effect is the same: users posting about nudity, LGBTQ+ expression, protests and Palestine are often the ones to claim they are shadow banned.

Social media platforms are not just for fun, they’re a source of work and political organising, and a way to spread important information to a large audience. When these companies censor content, it can affect the mental health and the livelihoods of people who use it.

These latest instances of shadow banning show that platforms can pick a side in active crises, and may affect public opinion by hiding or showing certain content. This power over what is visible and what is not should concern us all.

Carolina Are, Innovation Fellow, Northumbria University, Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – I grew up in the least-Jewish Jewish family around in the 1950s. We celebrated Christmas every year in a big-time fashion: tree, decorations, and all. And despite the desires of my dear grandmother, there would be no temple, no Sunday Hebrew school, no religion of any sort. I actually went to a Quaker school and I suspect that the first temple I ever entered was at 13 for a friend’s bar mitzvah. I did have one Israeli buddy for a few years, a neighbor who got a black-and-white TV before we did and so I spent as much time as I could in his apartment until his family went back to the Middle East. Yes, sometime in those early years, I was on the street with my own father when a passing stranger made an antisemitic slur and, being a tough, no-nonsense guy (“Major” Engelhardt as he liked his friends to call him from his years in World War II), my dad went right after him. And yes, one of my first roommates at Yale (which had only removed its Jewish quotas a year or two before I arrived in 1962), someone I grew to like, later told me that his dad, undoubtedly a Yale alumni, had specifically warned him to watch out for any Jew at Yale whose father was in the insurance business. (Consider that a knife through the heart!)

And none of that has ever changed. I married an ex-Catholic, brought my kids up without religion, and though there’s a temple catty-corner to the apartment building I’ve lived in for almost the last half-century, I’ve only been inside it once (for a Pete Seeger concert). And yet, explain it as you will, I take what Benjamin Netanyahu and crew, the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, are doing in Gaza in a strangely personal fashion. Yes, I was horrified when Hamas committed its grim crimes on October 7th, but somehow, somewhere deep in my heart, I never thought that the Israelis would respond not just in kind but in a fashion even more horrifying and without end.

I mean, honestly, given the historic suffering of Jews, who the hell kills untold thousands of children in a 25-mile-strip of land; attacks every hospital in sight; instantly cuts off food, fuel, and water to more than two million people; causes massive deaths (a daily toll higher than any other significant twenty-first-century conflict); destroys more than half of that area’s housing; and leaves untold thousands of Gazan civilians starving to death and with untreated illnesses of all sorts — and, after all of that, still isn’t faintly done? Somehow — yes, call it the hidden Jew in me — I take offense at that. And in that context, let me turn to TomDispatch regular Robert Lipsyte who offers his own very personal look at what being Jewish has meant to him and means to him now in this all-too-hellish world of ours. Tom

Article by Robert Lipsyte:

Eyeless in Gaza: Being Jewish and Being Heartbroken by the War

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Long ago, I came to believe that being a Jew, even a secular one like me, entailed certain responsibilities. A people who had suffered so much yet survived were obligated, if not honored, to serve as witnesses and supporters of other oppressed people and to live in the public interest, to model ethical lives. Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Sandy Koufax all made me proud, while I felt ashamed of Roy Cohn, Alan Dershowitz, and Henry Kissinger.

I never reached such lofty, self-righteous, or even chauvinistic heights or depths, but such figures, positive and negative, offered a comforting structure for my casual, shallow life as a Jew. I rarely observed high holy days. My children were neither bar nor bat mitzvahed. I have lived in a space somewhere between my immigrant grandmother’s anxious response to all current events — “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” — and my father’s snarky yet philosophical “Judaism would be a great religion if you got God out of it.” In my overall indifference to my Jewishness and my unsureness about what it meant to me lay, I thought, a kind of worldliness and emotional integrity. It was enough to attempt to live a decent life, be a sportswriter for the New York Times, write books for adults and children, try my best to do some good works.

Then October 7th arrived. And the response to it.

Middle East Eye Video: Footage from Unrwa shows the vast scale of destruction in Gaza

And soon, I began to wonder what I was so sure that I was unsure about now. With or without God onboard, what kind of Jew must I be right now, as Israelis valiantly defended their homeland and at the same time committed war crimes in my name, while the very words Israeli and Jew were fused in the public conversation?

What could anyone like me do in such circumstances to slow such a horrific drive toward both the destruction of others and self-destruction, while trying to continue the search for some kind of peace? How could we resolve our complicity as bystanders, whether as high-minded Spinoza-style Jews or the lox-and-bagel versions?

I’ve never thought so hard — or helplessly — about anything as I have recently about what it means to be a Jew. How did so many of us, as secular Jews, get to be where we are right now in a country that itself may be coming apart at the seams? How did we become trapped in a mindset that, whether in the Middle East or here, appears to deny a middle ground? I think of Samson in the bible story, blinded and enslaved by the Philistines in Gaza, still managing to pull the temple down around him. Do we still have the strength?

Immigrants and Refugees

Born in 1938, I grew up in New York City’s borough of Queens in an overwhelmingly Jewish community of middle-class strivers, many of whom were the children of late-nineteenth-century Eastern European immigrants. Their dreams were focused on sending their kids to college and moving to the suburbs. In their nightmares were pogroms in Poland (then fading from their collective memory) and the Holocaust, a horror kept fresh by the refugees from Europe who continued to arrive in our neighborhood throughout the late 1940s.

My neighbors hardly received all of the newcomers with open arms. Many of those Holocaust refugees came from Germany and had the stereotypical supercilious attitude of German Jews toward Eastern European ones. The refugees tended to be better educated, more cultivated, and often, despite their state, soon-to-be better off. (Many had relatives already here who would help them financially, house them, and even include them in established businesses.) In the America of that moment, the tattooed numbers on so many of their arms weren’t necessarily viewed with particular sympathy.

And their new neighbors often asked distinctly rude questions: Why hadn’t they resisted the Nazis? Why had they waited so long to leave Europe? It was as if they had decided to be willfully ignorant about how hard it must have been for the refugees to comprehend the way they had been betrayed by their former fellow citizens in Germany and how effective wartime America had been in keeping them out.

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I remember as a boy being confused by the antagonism. Weren’t we all Jews? I had enough problems with the antisemitism of the few gentiles I knew growing up. That included two Catholic cousins I happily played with in summers upstate until, when I was in sixth grade, they told me we could no longer be friends because I had killed Christ. And the slurs hardly ended there. They were usually thoughtless relics of ingrained bigotry, sometimes from the very teachers, editors, and colleagues who would help me most. I found out that, in some fashion, I could let it pass.

My Jewish education didn’t really begin until 1951, after a shotgun bar mitzvah forced by my grandparents. I ended up at a small reform Queens synagogue which was either poor enough or progressive enough to be willing to stage a quickie ceremony for me after only a few months of training in Hebrew. The rabbi, Solomon Landman, insisted that I stay on for confirmation classes. Reluctantly, I agreed and was swept away by his version of Judaism.

The classes were enthralling modern lessons in Jewish pride and accomplishment, highlighting figures ranging from Supreme Court Justices Benjamin Cardozo and Felix Frankfurter to baseball star Hank Greenberg to writers and philosophers like Spinoza to my true hero, Dr. Joseph Goldberger. He was the public health epidemiologist who discovered that pellagra, an often fatal skin disease, was caused by a niacin deficiency. I wanted to start a campaign to rename Vitamin B3, the cure he discovered, Vitamin G.

Ethics and moral decision-making were constant topics for us. We talked about the real meaning of being Jewish, about the importance of accepting responsibility for others, particularly the disadvantaged, about the need for true civil rights and a historical obligation to Black Americans. I was thrilled. The world began to make more sense to me. There was, it seemed, purpose in being a Jew beyond the “people of the book” mantra that always sounded to me like a claim to being a smarter species.

Godless Places

I came to believe that Rabbi Landman had been exiled to that backwater temple because he was so far ahead of his time. If there was a God, He had specifically dispatched the Rabbi to me. I began to look forward ever more eagerly to our weekly meetings. Then, suddenly, he died and my new world closed up. How could God have allowed that to happen? Or had God ever really been there at all?

At 14, I was done with religion. A few years later, Columbia University would prove a fairly godless place, as did the Army. I remember how, one frigid weekend, two other Jewish soldiers and I asked the sergeant in our unit for permission to skip outdoor clean-up duty and celebrate what we described as the holiday of Too Kolt. He consented, but the chaplain’s assistant, a Jew, busted us. Too Kolt was just too cute. It became a good, guilt-free story back on New York’s Upper West Side. My Jewish education, in other words, had become a joke.

That education took another complicated and fascinating turn when I married into a German-Jewish family, the first refugees I came to know well. The Glasers barely made it to America in 1938 with $5,000 in cash, four kids, and a mansion’s worth of furniture which they stuffed into a small house in Buffalo, New York. My father-in-law Willy, the patriarch, had been a factory owner but all his properties turned out to be in communist East Germany, and in that post-World War II, Cold War era there would be no reparations.

Nonetheless, over the years he managed to acquire and operate a thriving downtown photo studio and own apartments in Buffalo’s Black ghetto. He took me along once to collect rents from his “chocolates,” as he called his tenants, people he treated with a patriarchal affection that grated on the son of New York City public school teachers who had worked in Black schools.

After picking up the rents, mostly in cash, we went home for schnapps and reminiscences. Willy had been a corporal in the German Army in World War I — he showed me a depression in his thigh where he had taken a bullet for the Kaiser – and he remained regretful that he had never become an officer, despite his wealth and standing, because he was a Jew. He blamed jealous superiors. (If only the generals knew how he had been discriminated against!)

Believe it or not, he had expected better treatment by Hitler’s government. That man, Willy told me, had some good ideas for Germany. And he had expected Hitler to come to his senses on his urge to destroy Jews, but instead, of course, the Glasers had to flee with my future wife in her mother’s belly.

Willy fit easily enough into my old neighborhood’s stereotype of the German Jew. On paper, he was a white colonial and a slum landlord who found positives in Hitler. Still, I grew fond of him. The world, I realized, was more complicated than I had been led to believe. As it turned out, Willy and I stayed in touch longer than I did with his daughter.

By that time, the early 1960s, we were beginning to truly grasp the horrors of the Holocaust, not to speak of both the idealism and the political conniving that led to the creation of Israel. In some minds now, Zionism and British colonialism are simply lumped together as a pragmatic combination that solved “the Jewish problem,” while letting the Arabs pick up the bill. But that’s indicative of the ideological simple-mindedness that muddies this issue today. In the wake of World War II, the Jews needed a safe place to live, something they had never had, and Israel became a dream of survival.

At the same time, it wasn’t understood in this country that Palestinian Arabs weren’t just Indians to be subdued for the sake of the settlers (as in a John Wayne cowboy movie of the 1950s). Everyone, not just Jews, deserved the promise of “never again.” That still seems to be a hard sell with so many in this country and it doesn’t help that the most vocal advocates for Palestinian equality are often uncompromising young ideologues pitched against billionaire Israel lobbyists and Jews who are for Donald Trump because he’s supposedly on Israel’s side.

As for me, I visited Israel just once, some 20 years ago, reporting on an opera program for the New York Times. Except for airport security, I found everybody I met to be nice. I got greater insight from hearing about the trip my wife Lois Morris took there in 1973 as a travel writer. An Arab waiter followed her from the hotel restaurant and accosted her at the door to her room. A friend of hers appeared. They fought him off and reported him. After she identified the waiter, he was led away and she was told no statement would be necessary. Her word over his was sufficient. He would be in jail for at least six weeks. Almost 60 years ago, she was trapped in our same Israel conundrum — upset by the attack and appalled that the attacker had no rights in that country.

A World of Thugs and Vandals

In 1978, a quarter-century after my rabbi died, I was still raging over my deadbeat God, this time from a room at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. When a staff rabbi walked in to offer religious comfort, I threw him out, asking where this God of his had been while I was getting sick. In a fit of carcinoma bravado, I later wrote about the incident, including a gratuitous shout-out to a street gang, the Jewish Defense League: “If we’re going to have thugs and crazies who vandalize synagogues then we might as well have some who vandalize the vandals.”

Reading that in print was the start of my own experience of waking up. What, I thought, was I saying? Was I taking my cues from the thugs? Are they our teachers? Is that what happens in desperate times?

I was struggling with such thoughts when a letter arrived from Rabbi Alvin Kass, who had been a college classmate of mine, although we didn’t know each other then. Al had led a major conservative synagogue in Brooklyn and was the New York Police Department’s Jewish chaplain. (He’s head chaplain now.) In response to my piece, he gently wrote: “There is more to being Jewish than being categorized as such by a hostile world.”

I accepted his offer to meet and talk. We became friends. Over more than 40 years he’s joined Rabbi Landman as my spiritual advisor, officiating at my wedding, while offering rational possibilities in chaotic times. Of course, given the world we’re in, we’ve been talking far more urgently of late. Yes, Hamas are thugs and vandals, but how is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu any different in his behavior?

The truth is we shouldn’t have to choose between them. It’s important to get rid of them both, while, at least in our thinking, separating two power-mad and murderous ruling bodies from their people, most of whom just want peace. How can we use the “ethical monotheism” of Judaism to find common ground and a country for each? We don’t have that answer and don’t even know if it’s possible, but at least we should know what the only true goal is: to end the present horror. And that would be good for the Jews, with or without God.

Copyright 2024 Robert Lipsyte

Via Tomdispatch.com .

The figure of 85,750 is a worst case scenario and deaths would reach that level only if the military assault on Gaza escalates and if the poor hygienic conditions of the 1.9 displaced Palestinians cause epidemics.

But if an immediate ceasefire were achieved and no epidemics break out, a further 6,550 excess deaths would occur, or 11,580 if there are epidemics.

If there is no epidemic and if the Israeli military campaign continues on its current pattern without a significant escalation, then the death toll would rise by 74,290 over the next six months.

Since the Israeli military had already killed at least 29,313 people in Gaza, 70% of them women and children and the bulk of the remainder being non-combatant men, the study is saying that the total death toll is now fated to rise to between 35,800 and 40,893 even if not another shot is fired.

If Israel goes on fighting for another six months just at its current pace, the death toll rises to 103,603 in the absence of major disease outbreaks.

It seems unlikely that the fighting will go on at the current pace for six months. But it seems highly likely that there will be epidemics. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported yesterday,

The dire water and sanitation conditions are also aggravating the state of health in Gaza, with more than 300,000 reported cases of acute respiratory infections and more than 200,000 reported cases of acute watery diarrhoea, of whom more than half are children under five, among other outbreaks.

The authors of the “Crisis in Gaza” report say, “Our projections indicate that even in the best-case ceasefire scenario, thousands of excess deaths would continue to occur, mainly due to the time it would take to improve water, sanitation and shelter conditions, reduce malnutrition, and restore functioning healthcare services in Gaza.”

The report only appears to consider deaths from military attacks and disease, and factors in hunger mainly as enabling the latter. People weak with hunger cannot fight off diseases and famine and epidemics go along with one another.

OCHA quotes Dr. Mike Ryan of the World Heath Organization as saying, “Hunger and disease are a deadly combination. Hungry, weakened and deeply traumatised children are more likely to get sick, and children who are sick, especially with diarrhea, cannot absorb nutrients well. It’s dangerous, and tragic, and happening before our eyes.”

Palestinians are also exposed to the cold and wet weather of February in the Levant, which weakens immunity.

France 24 English Video: “War-torn Gaza children ‘disproportionately impacted’ by acute malnutrition, family separation, death “

But I think they should have considered deaths from hunger alone, since the Israeli government appears to be deliberately keeping the civilian, noncombatant population malnourished by limiting the number of aid trucks, the goods of which are allowed to enter the Strip. The fascist Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has refused to allow US shipments of flour to reach Gaza, reneging on a promise made to President Joe Biden by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. On February 5, Israeli troops in Gaza fired on a food aid convoy they had previously authorized, destroying the food.

OCHA points out that the relief organization Anera “highlighted the ‘silent crisis’ of hunger-induced deaths: ‘In the tragic circumstances of starvation in Gaza, there’s a compounding issue: many who perish from starvation-related symptoms aren’t accurately documented. Their deaths often get attributed to other physical causes, masking the true toll of starvation.’”

I have argued, based on Gaza health statistics, that thousands are already dying silently of hunger in Gaza. I wrote, “OCHA says that the Israeli campaign has left 378,000 people at catastrophic phase 5 levels of starvation. US AID explains that Phase 5 levels of starvation indicate that “acute malnutrition levels exceed 30 percent, and more than 2 per 1,000 people are dying each day.” Given that 378,000 people are being categorized by the UN as at phase 5, this definition suggests that 756 Palestinians in Gaza are dying of hunger each day, which comes to a projected 22,680 deaths from starvation over the next month.”

OCHA observes,

“Catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity are reportedly intensifying across Gaza, with growing reports of families struggling to feed their children and a rising risk of hunger-induced deaths in northern Gaza. The Global Nutrition Cluster is reporting a steep rise in malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women in the Gaza Strip. The situation is especially serious in northern Gaza where 1 in 6 children under the age of two (15.6 per cent) who were screened at IDP shelters and health centres in January were found to be acutely malnourished, a decline in a population’s nutritional status that is unprecedented globally in three months. In comparison, 5 per cent of children under the age of two in Rafah were found to be acutely malnourished, evidence that access to humanitarian aid can help prevent the worst outcomes.”

Let me just reiterate that the finding is that among the 150,000 people left in North Gaza, 1 in six children under the age of two are “severely malnourished.” Severe malnutrition has skyrocketed under the Israeli military’s reckless disregard for civilian life.

The London/ Johns Hopkins study concurs: “Before the current conflict, the global acute malnutrition (GAM) and severe acute malnutrition (SAM) prevalences were low amongst children 6-59 months (3.2% and 0.4%, respectively). As of 7 Feb 2024, we project they had already risen significantly (14.1% and 2.8%, respectively), albeit with likely geographical variations.”

They don’t think a ceasefire will help with this issue of child malnutrition very much, with GAM and SAM only reduced slightly — “(12.4% and 2.7% at 6 months, respectively.” In contrast, they fear that if the military campaign continues for six months, child malnutrition will increase many times over.

As for the possibility of epidemics, they write: “If epidemics also occur, those that are projected to cause the most excess deaths are cholera (3,595-8,971), polio (both wild-type and vaccine-derived; 1,1145-2,444), measles (260-793), and meningococcal meningitis (24-143).”

So cholera is the big threat and could cause almost 10,000 deaths over the next six months all on its own. When I lived in Eritrea in the 1960s I knew a teenager who contracted cholera. He survived, but spent days expelling liquid from all his orifices. It was horrible. You die of dehydration.

The citation for the report is: Zeina Jamaluddine, Zhixi Chen, Hanan Abukmail, Sarah Aly, Shatha Elnakib, Gregory Barnsley et al. (2024). Crisis in Gaza: Scenario-based health impact projections. Report One: 7 February to 6 August 2024. London, Baltimore: London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Johns Hopkins University. The pdf is here.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Emotions ran high yesterday as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) started its hearing on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, with Palestine’s UN envoy Riyad Mansour moved to tears as he delivered his final remarks. Mansour spoke about a future where the children of Palestine would be treated as children and not as a “demographic fit”; when the human rights of Palestinians would not be “diminished” because of their ethnicity and identity; and where two states would live side by side, in peace.

Over six days, the world court is hearing oral arguments from 52 countries and three international organisations, following a UN General Assembly request filed in 2022 for an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The hearing comes as Israel continues its devastating war on the Gaza Strip, where it has now killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians and laid waste to most of the besieged enclave.

The UN’s top court is already deliberating on a case filed by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza, having ordered provisional measures and finding a plausible risk of genocide in its interim ruling in January.

All of the speakers during the hearing will present their views on why they support or oppose the measures that Israel has enforced in the occupied Palestinian territory. Israel itself has opted out of the hearing and instead submitted a written argument.

A court ruling is likely to take months, but could be possible somewhere between April and June, suggested Victor Kattan, assistant professor of international law at the University of Nottingham in the UK. Any decision in favour of the Palestinians will be “a vindication of their rights by the principal judicial organ of the United Nations,” he told Anadolu.

If the court comes out and holds Israel responsible for the “prohibition of the crime of apartheid, for example,” that could be quite significant, explained Kattan, because the UN has special organs and institutions to deal with combating apartheid, which have not been used for almost four decades. “They could be used to coordinate policies aimed at putting pressure on Israel to end its occupation in discriminatory policies against the Palestinian people.”

Kattan has written extensively on the Israel-Palestine issue, and said that the ICJ has essentially been asked to defend international law and to make it relevant again. “In a way, it kind of reinforces the importance and value of this approach to the International Court of Justice.”

The hearings, Kattan explained, will deal with two issues, the first being to look at the ongoing violations that Israel has committed by prolonging its occupation, denial of self-determination, major demographic changes, human rights violations and racial discrimination, as well as apartheid. The second is the question about the consequences for states arising from these violations of international law.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Palestine demands end to Israeli occupation at ICJ hearing”

The legal expert noted that the participating countries had submitted their arguments well before the 7 October Hamas attack, so it would be interesting to see how Israel’s allies shape their arguments in light of its deadly actions in Gaza. “The argument that Israel or these allies would be putting in front of these proceedings will be that this does not come under the (court’s) jurisdiction or that this is not admissible. They may say this is a political issue that needs to be resolved in negotiations.”

According to Kattan, “They’re going to simply ask the court not to consider the request at all on the grounds of jurisdiction and admissibility. However, in my view, it’s a very weak argument given the special role of the court in matters concerning decolonisation and the like.” They may also say that this is a bilateral process and that peace can only come — statehood can only come — when the Palestinians reach an agreement.

“That may be their argument, but UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron just came out and said that, actually, a Palestinian state doesn’t have to wait until the end of negotiations,” Kattan pointed out. “So, we may already be seeing a shift even in the stance of Israel’s friends in that regard, and this would explain why [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu is coming out with such belligerent statements and saying that he’ll never accept a Palestinian state.”

Kattan warned that the ICJ proceedings have enough significance that Israel might do something to divert the world’s attention away from them.

“That could, for example, be deciding to attack Rafah,” a reference to Israel’s planned ground assault on the southern Gaza city currently sheltering over 1.4 million displaced Palestinians, an attack which has been condemned around the world.

Once the oral arguments conclude on 26 February, the court will start its deliberations and likely give an opinion in a few months.

“The judges will have heard the oral submissions, and they have access to written statements and comments on written statements since last year, which they have undoubtedly read, which may have also informed them, by the way, on the genocide case as well. The key points to look out for are how far does the court accept some of the arguments that Palestine has made, what kind of majorities or dissenting opinions emerge, and what are the reasons for the dissent,” said Kattan.

“If the court does give a good opinion, a majority opinion, that the occupation, for example, is illegal or that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid, for example, and that states have an obligation to… refrain from trading in arms [with Israel] that will then be referred back to the UN General Assembly. The General Assembly will take note of it and then it’ll have to pass a resolution.”

The legal expert pointed out that these resolutions are not formally binding, and if it gets to the UN Security Council, we can expect the US to veto any attempts to enforce international law against Israel. “However, it is possible that some states may take matters into their own hands if the opinion is drafted well. If it’s got a large majority, it would give some states the opportunity to enforce international law themselves.” he said.

These states could contend that the court has said they should not be trading with Israel or with entities that are operating in the occupied territories, Kattan suggested.

“It might give a reason for those states to cut diplomatic relations or to take measures to enforce international law. So, even if it doesn’t come from the UN Security Council level, it’s possible for states to implement sanctions unilaterally. Whether they do so or not, we have to wait and see.”

Regarding the participation of countries in favour of Palestine, Kattan said that it is “testimony to the hard work of Palestinian diplomats, who undoubtedly would have been lobbying their friends to support them in this case.” The case also shows that Israel is “more isolated” than before 7 October, particularly in the Global South.

“Perhaps it is also becoming more isolated with states from areas it considers its friends, such as in Europe,” he added. Initially there was massive sympathy for Israel after the Hamas attacks, continued Kattan, but that has “now dissipated because of the Israeli military operations and attacks in Gaza.”

He asserted that Israel’s war on Gaza has revived the issue of Palestinian statehood and brought it back onto the global agenda. “It has undoubtedly galvanised the tension and reminded everyone that this conflict, although it’s very old, is not finished. It is still there, festering.”

While most states recognise Palestine, there are some like the UK that have already made a legal determination that Palestine is a state, but have withheld formal recognition for political reasons.

“There were some states, for instance, that voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution according Palestine observer status and statehood all the way back in 2012, but withheld from upgrading their relations,” said Kattan. “And now we can see that for some Western countries the idea of recognising Palestine is back on the agenda in connection with debates on how to end the conflict in Gaza, how to give the Palestinian people a political horizon, and how to ensure that the conflict that we are seeing never happens again.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

The human rights experts held a news conference on Monday to call for an impartial inquiry into the abuses apparently committed by Israeli troops against women and girls, including murder, rape, and sexual assault. They expressed extreme concern at the “horrifying reports” that had reached them

International human rights experts called for an independent investigation into suspected Israeli violations committed against Palestinian women and girls, including murder, rape, and sexual assault. The experts expressed their deep concern about the “horrific reports” that revealed cases of rape and threats of sexual assault by Israeli forces during their arbitrary detention of Palestinian women and girls in Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank. They said there were “credible and conclusive allegations of blatant violations” and that women and girls were victims of arbitrary execution, often alongside members of their families, including children. In a communique, they expressed their shock at the reports of deliberate targeting and extra-judicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought safety or while they were fleeing.

These human rights experts were appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, but are independent and not UN representatives. I give their names below.

TRT World Video: “Israeli violations against Palestinian girls, women in Gaza”

They pointed to the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian women, among them human rights defenders, journalists, and humanitarian activists in Gaza and the West Bank. They said, “Many were exposed to inhumane and degrading treatment and to severe beatings. They were deprived of menstrual pads during their periods, of food, and of medicine.”

The Office of the High Commission on Human Rights quotes the experts as saying, “We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence.”

OHCHR adds, “They also noted that photos of female detainees in degrading circumstances were also reportedly taken by the Israeli army and uploaded online.”

They spoke of their dismay at reports of Palestinian women in prison being subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, including strip searching by male troops of the Israeli army. They demanded an independent, unimpeachable, comprehensive, urgent and effective investigation into these assaults, with full Israeli cooperation.

They said that they had evidence that at least two imprisoned Palestinian women were raped, while others were threatened with rape and sexual violence. They said there were indications that Palestinian girls and women were deliberately targeted and extra-judicially executed in places of asylum or during their attempts to escape. Some of the latter were waving pieces of white cloth but were killed by the Israeli army.

According to OHCHR, the communique concluded, “Taken together, these alleged acts may constitute grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and amount to serious crimes under international criminal law that could be prosecuted under the Rome Statute. . . . Those responsible for these apparent crimes must be held accountable and victims and their families are entitled to full redress and justice,”

The OHCHR notes that the experts were “Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences; Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; Dorothy Estrada Tanck (Chair), Claudia Flores, Ivana Krstić, Haina Lu, and Laura Nyirinkindi, Working group on discrimination against women and girls. The experts are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN human rights system.”

The Israeli mission in Geneva hastened to denounce the communique, charging that the international human rights rapporteurs were animated by a hatred of Israel rather than a devotion to the truth. It said that the Israeli authorities had not received any complaints but were prepared to investigate the Israeli security forces if there were credible allegations and evidence.

It is a particularly ugly custom of Israeli officials to meet any criticism with charges of “hating Israel” or hating Jews, which they conflate with the former. Tel Aviv owes an apology to these internationally respected human rights experts, even if they are only women.