Bolivia’s government severed diplomatic relations with Israel on Tuesday 31 October 2023, accusing it of carrying out “crimes against humanity” in Gaza. María Nela Prada Tejada, a diplomat, politician, minister of the Bolivian presidency said categorically, “We demand an end to the attacks on the Gaza Strip which have so far claimed thousands of civilian lives and caused the forced displacement of Palestinians.”
Ilan Pappé notes, in an interview prefaced by a reference to the leaked Israeli document which outlines a plan to displace the entire Gaza population into the Sinai Desert, “what unfolds in front of our eyes is a genocidal situation …this is a massive operation of killing, of ethnic cleansing of the population. The pretext for that kind of savagery is revenge for what the Hamas did on the 7th of October but I think the real intention here is … to create new realities in historical Palestine.” He goes on to state that the Nakba has never really ended for the Palestinians so it’s a new horrific chapter in the ongoing Nakba.” Pappé is a professor of history and the director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. See also an earlier interview here – Terrorism and Genocidal Revenge
Max Blumenthal makes the explosive proposition that the Israeli military shelled the homes of Israeli civilians and made helicopter attacks on civilian cars and Israeli bases as they fought to dislodge Hamas militants from the country’s south on October 7. Based on 1st person accounts and other Israeli sources, he argues that the substantiated death count is only about 900 and not around 1400 as Israel claims. Most significantly, he suggests that an undertermined proportion of these deaths might have been self-inflicted, resulting from Israeli military protocols that are aimed at meeting Palestinian incursions with devastating force and also at minimizing hostage negotiation situations. He concluded, “Indeed, it appears that on October 7, Israel’s military resorted to the same tactics it has employed against civilians in Gaza, driving up the death toll of its own citizens with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons.”
European settler colonialism was initiated in the 15th century, on the premise of a divinely ordained white supremacy1, and the founding of Israel in the land of the Palestinians during the British Mandate in the 20th Century was the last significant instantiation of this mode of ethnopolitical domination, albeit it might be seen as a species of settler colonialism all of its own.2 The current British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, removed Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Paul Bristow from his post for rebelling against the government’s position on the ongoing war in Gaza. Bristow had expressed his support for a ceasefire and called on the PM to push for an end to fighting between Israel and Hamas. That Sunak, who rose to his high station in the British polity from Indian origins, and who should, therefore, be alert to the inhumanity of subjugation, would be complicit in Israel’s genocidal colonial expansion in the 21st century, is a shame unto him, his family, and their origins.
This theocratic doctrine was initiated 1452, when Pope Nicholas V issued a bull Dum Diversas which authorized King Afonso V of Portugal, to subjugate the lands of non-Christians.
While, it can be argued that Zionism does not derive directly from the Christian ‘doctrine of discovery’, the ethos of populating lands of non-Jews with European Jewish settlers under the auspices and geo-political designs of the British Empire, in my opinion, within the bounds of a broad notion of settler colonialism.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, donned the despicable yellow star that Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis to mark them out as such in Aryan society. After saying “From now on my team and I will wear Yellow Stars”. He stood up to put on his star, sat down again, and said, “We will wear this star until you condemn the atrocities of Hamas and demand the immediate release of our hostages.” The original yellow star had the word ‘Jude’ emblazoned across its center, while the ambassador and his delegation donned stars that said, ‘Never Again’. The Irony of this political theatre at the UN is that the Holocaust had already been invoked in the mediain a comparison with the contemporary Israeli persecution of Palestinians. Palestinian American celebrity Mohamed Hadid made a much maligned repost of a meme on X which itemised the 6 congruities between Israel and the Nazis . Hadid was accused of antisemitism and eventually removed his post. I have restated the correlations presented in the meme below – 1. an ideology/nationality based on racial supremacy, 2. the forced transfer of populations, 3. containment within ghettos and concentration camps, 4. the use of language to dehumanize, 5. collective punishment and 6. genocide by industrial means.
The Massacre of Innocents is a 17th-century masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin that crystalizes, in the portrayal of a single imminent action, an eternal image of child murder. According to the Bible, King Herod the Ascalonite, who was a vassal of Imperial Rome in Judea, feared the advent of a new ‘King of the Jews.’ Unable to ascertain the precise location or age of the new-born Jesus Christ, he decreed the collateral slaughter of all the babies under 2 years old in and around Bethlehem (Matthew 2:1). This ancient specter of child murder has returned to haunt us today, both in the debunked (updated December 20) Israeli claim that HAMAS beheaded 40 babies in its fearsome raid on October 7th and, more concretely, in the number of dead Gazan children, laid waste in Israel’s fearful response.
UPDATE: The number of Palestinian children slaughtered stands at 8,663 (this figure is an estimate as of December 19).
The United States was the only member of the Security Council to veto a draft resolution put forward by Brazil at the UN Security Council calling for a humanitarian pause in the assault on Gaza. This vote, which took place on 18 Oct 2023 followed an earlier resolution that was voted against by France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for failing to condemn the HAMAS attack on Israel. Blocking this second, amended, call for a cessation of hostilities, which in fact specifically condemned “the heinous terrorist attacks by Hamas,” enables, Israel to continue its slaughter of innocent Palestinians without the legal restraint of UN censure. CNN reports that the US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield criticized the resolution for failing to mention Israel’s right to self-defense, thereby perpetuating the Israeli conflation of the semantics of ‘attack’ and ‘defense.’ She also explained that the US wanted more time to let its on-the-ground diplomacy “play out.” It seems that the United States is enabling, even promoting, what Raz Segal has called a textbook case of genocide. Shame!
26. 10 2003 update: 7,028 people killed by air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
The Koboi Project 
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