Tag: Israel

Genocide Syndrome by Proxy?

~ The Koboi Project

Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.

In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism! 

To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?

The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.


Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2014/08/11/rob-rogers-makes-the-mistake-of-expressing-an-opinion-on-israel-and-gaza/

https://www.jpost.com/International/Haig-had-a-special-feeling-for-Israel

https://brownstone.org/articles/ukraine-as-a-proxy-war-conflicts-issues-parties-and-outcomes/

https://www.verywellmind.com/munchausen-by-proxy-5071840

After Gaza?

~ The Koboi Project

Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.

Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.


https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-02/israel-gaza-palestinian-american-history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-escalates-huwara

https://historyguy.com/list_of_wars_middle_east.html

Le Pouvoir Noir 1968 à 2023, Quel Dégringole!

~ The Koboi Project

Image after George Gallaway’s expression “the raised hand of shame covered in blood!” Please see below –

Image: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-black-power-salute-that-rocked-the-world-50-years-ago/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-vetoes-gaza-war-un-resolution-that-doesnt-stress-israeli-right-to-self-defense/
https://humnews.pk/world/us-vetoes-security-council-demand-for-ceasefire/

Bertrand Russell on Israel and Palestine

~ The Koboi Project

Paul Williams contextualizes and reads a statement by British Philosopher Bertrand Russell dated 31st January 1970 that was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, at an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo. Below, I have identified key recommendations, made in 1970, that remain moral imperatives today –

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.

A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.

Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967.

The Gaza Nativity

~ The Koboi Project
The Pastor of the Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, Munther Ishaq, says that this year, Christmas celebrations are canceled because “it is impossible to celebrate Christmas when our people in Gaza are going through a Genocide.” The nativity display in this church will have figures of Joseph and Mary and the Magi set up as if they are looking for baby Jesus amid the rubble. While celebrations are canceled, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, he says that there will be Christmas prayers and “maybe when we look at the image of Jesus under the rubble we see a light of Hope and Life coming out of Destruction.”

See also:

This is not a Religious Conflict

Le Massacre des Innocents

Applying the Sri Lanka Genocide Model in Gaza 6

~ The Koboi Project

WARNING: DO NOT PROCEED TO THE VIDEO ABOVE IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE
THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DISTURBING DOCUMENTARY WITH VIDEO AND PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF DEATH, INJURY, SEXUAL VIOLENCE, TORTURE, AND MURDER. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE VIDEO ABOVE ONLY AFTER REFLECTING ON THE POSSIBLE IMPACT ON YOUR EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING.

Following the establishment of the de-facto Tamil state in the North and East of the island, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government maintained a tenuous ceasefire from 2001 to 2006. Between 2004 and 2005, the tsunami hit eastern Sri Lanka, the LTTE Eastern wing broke away from the Northern Command, weakening the Tamil Tigers hold on their territory. In late 2006, large-scale fighting resumed, and by May the LTTE was finally defeated ending the de-facto state of Tamil Elam. The last months of this bloody three-decade-long war are the subject of a deeply disturbing documentary titled No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka.

With the resumption of hostilities in Gaza, the seemingly deliberate targeting of civilians by the Israeli Defence Forces, and the scale of the casualties recorded thus far, there is good reason to remember such precedents as the Sri Lankan Genocide evidenced in the video above and to call for an end to the Israeli action. Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, reports how the Israeli Defence Force’s extensive use of Artificial Intelligence programmes that treat high-rise buildings as “power targets” with large civilian casualties, has turned it into a “mass assassination factory.” Between October 7th and December 3rd, there have been 15,207 killed of which 6,150 are children.

The cronology presented above has been compiled from the following three articles:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-srilanka-war-timeline-sb-idUSTRE54F16620090518/
https://www.wionews.com/photos/a-timeline-to-tamil-tigers-37-year-marathon-struggle-against-lankan-army-for-separate-state-219592
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Eelam#cite_note-sunday-42

https://nofirezone.org/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-

https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/

From the River to the Sea 2

~ The Koboi Project

” a) The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

This is the first tenet of the Nethanhayu’s Likud Party’s original Platform statement of 1977. Any claim by Zionists that From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free is a call to genocide is disingenuous and obfuscatory. In 1942, European and American Zionist’s set forth the seminal Biltmore Conference Declaration which laid claim to the whole of the British Mandatory Palestine for their new settler colonial state –

“8. … The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.“

Indeed, it is the Zionist version of From the River (the Jordan) to the Sea, that is founded on acts of ethnic cleansing, starting with the Nkabah of 1948 and continuing on through the last 75 years by way of sustained apartheid oppression, relentless settlement activity, crushing military rule, and murderous wars on civilian populations. It is Israel, that is an exclusive and exclusionary ethnocracy. Before the imposition of this Jewish state upon its territory, Palestine was a multiethnic, multireligious land of Arabs, both Christians and Muslims, Bedouins and Jews. There is nothing to suggest that either contemporary Palestinian national aspirations or the slogan uttered in this cause, is genocidal or hateful in any way. It is not a call for ridding the land of Jews. From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free should be understood in the context of the above declaration and the second tenet of the Likud Party Platform which explicitly refuses the establishment of a Palestinian State anywhere on this land.-

” b) A plan which relinquishes parts of western Eretz Israel, undermines our right to the country, unavoidably leads to the establishment of a “Palestinian State,” jeopardizes the security of the Jewish population, endangers the existence of the State of Israel. and frustrates any prospect of peace.“

While it must be acknowledged that a liberation slogan can mean different things to different people, From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free, when interpreted in its proper historical context, is simply a cry for freedom, across all the land, for all the people.

See also From the River to the Sea

Image: https://sd.keepcalms.com/i/from-the-river-to-the-sea-palestine-will-be-free-1.png

https://www.palquest.org/en/historictext/6723/biltmore-conference-declaration

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party

The Poppy is the Flower of Palestine

~ The Koboi Project

Yesterday was Remembrance Day, and I must confess that, as someone who has lived in lands whare this ritual is practiced since I was 17, I have never worn the Remembrance Day poppy. This is because, while I respect those who have fallen in service of their country, I have always thought this symbolism to be sanctimonius; that it is as much about pomp and militarism, as it is about honouring the sacrifices of the fallen.

My concerns have been heightened by the controversy around this year’s Remembrance Day observances in the UK, wherein the highest officials of government cast aspersions on the March calling for a ceasfire in Palestine that took place on the same day (Saturday 11th November). The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, had called for this march to be postponed claiming that it was “disrespectful and provocative,” because of its coincidence with and proximity to the service at the Cenotaph. His Home Secretary, Suella Bravaman, had characterized previous marches as “Hate Marches” on the basis of the chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” which she interpreted as a call for “the erasure of Israel from the map.” The irony of this savage disparagement, is that the ethea of Remembrance Day and the March for Palestine, are in fact, one and the same. An ‘armistice’ is a ‘ceasefire.’

There is, an even deeper irony here. The Imperial British symbol of remembrance, the red poppy, is also a national symbol of Palestine, a nation whose obliteration was initiated in one of the closing acts of the said imperium. As Rosabel Crean explains, the poppy, which grows in abundance in Palestine, symbolizes the relationship between Palestinians and their land, the bloodshed they have endured, as well as their resistance against Israeli occupation. My new awareness of the Palestinian symbolism notwithstanding, I will continue paying my respects to the dead of war, both civilian and military, without wearing the Remembrance Day poppy.

See also: Remembrance Day Will Never Be the Same Again

Image: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0d/30/e0/0d30e083a2e36cba5191a72f6acaf80d.jpg

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15637074

https://news.sky.com/story/these-are-hate-marches-home-secretary-hits-out-at-pro-palestinian-protests-as-uk-terror-threat-level-remains-substantial-12996645

https://www.newarab.com/news/poppies-are-national-symbol-palestinians-not-just-uk

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/09/london-pro-palestine-armistice-day-march

Witness to Slaughter

~ The Koboi Project

Matteo di Giovanni is of particular interest in the present series of posts (see links below) as his reputation as a significant Renaissance artist is based on his being the author of four monumental versions of the Massacre of the Innocents. The detail above is from the version painted for the Sant’Agostino Chapel in Siena. The foreground of this image (see the full image below) is filled with figures, entangled in the violence of the massacre. There are anguished mothers, resisting mothers; there are babies, both dead and dying; there are the soldiers, thrusting and slashing their way to fulfilling Herod’s sinister decree.

In the selected detail, which, judging from the lighting, is a focal point of the composition, a soldier is shown thrusting his sword into a baby’s mouth, its point exiting out the infant’s skull. As the soldier concentrates on his action, his expression and stance suggest that he recognizes the disproportionality of his weapon to his task. The baby is shown, with blank eyes, in the throes of a horrific death. The anguished mother looks at us in mute resignation. Behind the mother, is an odd figure who may or may not be attached to one of the disembodied weapon-wielding arms glimpsed through the mass of writhing humanity, stares out at the viewer, engaging with us in a manner that is not uncommon in the Rennaisance Istoria (History painting). He communicates with us as if to say, “you see” or perhaps, “you are a witness”, or even “you are complicit.”

In the contemporary massacre that is ongoing in the land of the very Book referenced in this image, the number of Palestinian children slaughtered in Gaza stands at 8,663 (UpdatedDecember 19), and we are all witnesses to this slaughter of innocents, as it happens on our screens.

See also:

Grace in the Face of Suffering

Netanyahu channels King Herod!

Le Massacre des Innocents

The Advance of Maleficence

Detail Image: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-massacre-of-the-innocents-detail-of-a-soldier-piercing-a-baby-with-his-sword-1482-matteo-di-giovanni-di-bartolo.html

Image: http://travelingintuscany.com/art/matteodigiovanni.htm

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Jewish Voice for Peace

~ The Koboi Project

According to Al Jazeera, hundreds of Jewish activists occupied the Statue of Liberty on 7th Nov 2023, to demand a ceasefire in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. They unfurled banners including one that proclaimed NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE, while wearing black T-shirts bearing the slogans Jews Demand Ceasefire Now and Not in our Name. Anyone, regardless of which side of this conflict they belong, who conflates Jews with Zionists and antizionists with antisemites is, at best, deeply mistaken.

Image composited from: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/11/7/jewish-new-yorkers-occupy-statue-of-liberty-to-demand-gaza-ceasefire