Israel’s Gaza Division was routed by modestly equipped fighters on pickups and motorbikes on October 7. Two months later, Israel kidnapped a bunch of defenseless guys sheltering at a UN school, hauled them off to a torture center and called it “destroying Hamas” – American Journalist and author, Max Blumenthal.
It is for Palestinians to decide their future. Our role is not to single out what is good resistance and what is bad. Currently Palestinian resistance is destroying or disabling Israeli Merkava tanks (reports on the ground suggest Israel has lost about 400 tanks, they only have about 1,700 battle ready tanks). So Israel is running out of time to achieve any of its stated objectives i.e getting rid of Hamas, return of the Israeli prisoners captured on 7 October) . From the outset Israel has been poorly led by cowardly murderous politicians and soldiers supported by armed fascist settlers.
Our role is offer solidarity to the Palestinians in their struggle for justice and freedom.
We publish these comments by Max Blumenthal about lies Israel has been putting about by Israel concerning the nature of the resistance. – Ian Curr, Ed. 9 Dec 2023.
__oOo__
I’m grateful English speakers no longer need machine translation to read this desperate screed, which relies on the same manipulation tactics it accuses me of to protect the official narrative justifying Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
Its author, someone named Michal Perach (more on her later), falsely alleges Palestinian militants carried out beheadings and gang rapes inside Israel on October 7 while providing no evidence – because there is none – and ignores the mountain of lurid lies her government has deployed to generate support for the criminal butchering of over 8000 children and women.
Perach falsely claims, “there are two known events where Israeli civilians were apparently killed due to Israeli fire.” To advance her bogus claim, the Haaretz contributor omits a substantial section of my article demonstrating how the Israeli military bombed its own military base at Erez Crossing when it was taken over by Palestinian militants.
As I noted, citing none other than Haaretz, the Israeli military was “compelled to request an aerial strike” against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza “in order to repulse the terrorists” who had seized control.
That base was filled with Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers at the time. Revealingly, Perach also omits a key section in my article sourcing (guess who?) Haaretz, which referenced direct orders from the Israeli military high command to shell civilian homes in Kibbutz Be’eri. It quotes a security coordinator in Be’eri as follows: “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”
We now know through the testimony of two survivors from Be’eri that an Israeli tank shelled a civilian home with full knowledge that over a dozen Israeli noncombatants were inside or on its grounds. It killed all of them, including the 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni.
Haaretz’s Perach minimizes this scandal as a “tragic isolated incident[],” omitting the fact that everyone from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to the Israeli Foreign Ministry have claimed Palestinians burned Hetzroni to death, lying to the world in order to rustle up support for their exterminationist war of revenge.
Are we supposed to believe that this was the only home in Be’eri in which Israelis were killed, when nearly every home in the small town has been reduced to rubble? Were the Kalashnikov-toting bands of Hamas militants capable of such ruinous damage – a form of decimation similar to what we now see in Gaza, where Israel’s apartheid army massacres sleeping families throughout the night while veteran Haaretz correspondents like Chaim Levinson excitedly justify their murders?
Haaretz’s Perach goes on to downplay the Israeli police investigation which found that Israeli Apache helicopters hit Israelis fleeing the Nova electronic music festival, writing that “a helicopter may have fired on Israelis.”
She omits my quoting of the helicopter pilot who described how “there was almost no intelligence to help make fateful decisions”; the pilot who said, “I understand that we have to shoot here and quickly. Shooting at people in our territory – this is something I never thought I would do”; the pilot who described shooting 30 meters from a kibbutz home he knew was filled with Israelis, and possibly hitting the home; and the point on October 7 when, according to Israel’s Ynet, “the Apache pilots realized that they had to skip all the restrictions” on who or what to fire at.
The rest of the article is larded with predictable smears likening me to Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, whining about me failing to refer to Hamas as “terrorists,” and attacks on The Grayzone for challenging humanitarian interventionist propaganda on Ukraine and Syria. For example, Haaretz’s Perach absurdly claims we “accused the Syrian aid group the White Helmets of war crimes that were actually committed by the Assad regime,” when in fact, we demonstrated in clinical and factual fashion how the White Helmets were created by British intelligence, funded by the US and British governments, and ultimately evacuated by the Israeli Shin Bet through the occupied Golan Heights when their mission to destabilize Syria failed.
It appears that Perach’s attack on me is her first piece of published writing. So who is she? A cursory browse of her Facebook page shows her in the streets of Tel Aviv passionately protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like most of those populating Haaretz’s offices, she is a stereotypical Israeli left-liberal flaunting their indignation at official evildoers like Putin and Assad while transforming almost instantly into an animalistic genocidaire as soon as Palestinian resistance factions puncture their hermetic Western European existence in the heart of the Arab world.
This hypocritical mentality distills the essence of Haaretz, which published a 2002 op-ed by its then-star pundit Ari Shavit describing Israel’s rampage to crush the Second Intifada as a “war…about the morning’s coffee and croissant. About the beer in the evening.”
Over two decades later, Israel is engaged in a straightforward genocide to preserve its dwindling colonial fantasy. And Haaretz, the official organ of the “enlightened public” that despises Netanyahu but hates Palestinians even more, is leading the charge.
https://fb.watch/oQCeLJf4Az/?mibextid=Nif5oz
US skips congressional review for emergency sale of tank shells to Israel https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/9/us-skips-congressional-review-for-emergency-sale-of-tank-shells-to-israel
Semites?
The new Gelati shop in Civic has been plastered with Boycott Israel stickers and there is carry-on about antisemitism.
The Zionists are working had to turn us all into antisemites in their meaning of the term. ‘If you criticize any of our crimes you are an antisemite.’
I decline to be bullied down that path. However, the question is more complicated. First of all, the science of race is that all variations are within 0.2 percent of our genomes.
On those grounds, being a Semite can hardly be said to matter. But if it did, let it not be forgotten that the Arabs are Semites – though perhaps not the Persians? The next hurdle is where does being a Jew fit in. Slomo Sand’s
The Invention of the Jewish People shows that most of the Israelis are not Jews or Semites in any racial sense, or being the children of Abraham. Most are the descendants of converts during the past 1,000 or more years.
So, we have Jew as a religion. That is complicated by the fact that more than half of the population of Israelis are non-believers. They are cultural Jews, as we atheists are cultural Christians, even without knowing it. Think Christmas.
On top of which the Zealots have passed a law stipulating that only ‘jews’ are Israelis.
Pedro Curtis
10 Dec 2023