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Leahy Law
Multiple provisions in U.S. law restrict the sale or provision of weapons to other countries, including the federal Arms Export Control Act, the Foreign Assistance Act, and the Leahy Law. The open letter draws on evidence from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other watchdogs to argue that continuing to provide weapons to Israel blatantly violates these laws, in addition to international treaties.
The PA is an arm of Israeli Apartheid, Occupation, and Suppression.
The PA creates the appearance of Palestinian autonomy, but in fact, much like the governments of the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, it is simply an extension of the colonial state, a tool of counterinsurgency that is highly effective for the repression of local rebellions, because it makes the native population police itself. Fatah, which was a revolutionary movement in the early days of the armed struggle, is now mostly contained by the PA.
Israel’s stabilization strategy, inspired by modern counterinsurgency doctrine, has rested on two pillars: the employment of pacification measures to co-opt Palestinians and reliance on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to police its population on Israel’s behalf. However, many Palestinians are now fighting back against this approach, while the PA’s eroding legitimacy has only hardened the population’s refusal to accept its restrictive methods.
It is presented here as it has been perceived by the Israeli policymakers and bureaucrats down the years. For them the PA was an integral and crucial component in the open-air prison model suggested in the 1990s, and one which the pragmatic elite of Israel still hopes to instate in the West Bank, at least in the near future.
In appearance, the PA has all the trappings of a state, with ministries and a civil service, but Israel wields the real power, turning the tap on tax revenue, and controlling access to the shrinking territories – a status quo often compared with the Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa.
The PA has actively helped Israel to keep tight control over the Palestinian population. Many perceive the body as a tool of the Israeli security apparatus, its US-trained forces not only targeting those suspected of planning attacks on Israelis, but also arresting union figures, journalists and critics on social media.
Israel relies on this division of the West Bank to foster the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is the entity primarily responsible for administering the life of the majority of Palestinians in the West Bank. In practice, however, Israel still retains control over the entire West Bank and all its residents.
Don’tbe evil - Google
At least their logo was 2/3rds right
You’re the one that is conflating resistance against the exterminationist ideology that is Zionism to genuine antisemitism.
It’s a gross sentiment to still see when we are years into a genocide. No different from pinning blame on Jewish resistance fighters under Nazi Germany.
I do find it strange that the people down voting are more upset about someone pointing out how Biden broke International and Domestic (Leahy) Law to finance a genocide than the actual genocide itself
He really, really wanted the global rule of law to work.
No, Biden did not. He actively broke it by financing Israel’s genocide against international and domestic law.
The US has let Israel steer US foreign policy in the region since at least Trump 1 admin, but the US still holds all the power in this dynamic and could force Israel to stop anytime if they really wanted to (they don’t)
Taco bell is on the boycott list, support your local taco trucks 🌮
Apartheid is not peace
Would you be less supportive of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising if they did kill more civilians in Nazi Germany?
For the last seventeen years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every ten minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of ten Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.
The term “open-air prison” seems to have been coined in 2010 by David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary who was then Prime Minister. Many human-rights organizations that document conditions in Gaza have adopted the description. But as in the Jewish ghettoes of Occupied Europe, there are no prison guards—Gaza is policed not by the occupiers but by a local force. Presumably, the more fitting term “ghetto” would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is being liquidated.
The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate—and, now, mortally endanger—an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.
Another case that is especially important to me as a Jewish person, having studied our history of persecution and rebellion, is the Sobibor Uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is of course the most famous Jewish revolt of that era, and many people made the analogy, including Refaat Alareer, a Gazan poet who generated controversy for drawing this comparison on BBC, and who was murdered by Israel as a possible consequence. The Sobibor revolt, while much less well known, was more of a success story. Sobibor was a concentration camp where, in 1943, realizing they were all going to get killed, a small group of maybe twenty people, some of them prisoners of war, organized in secrecy, came up with a sophisticated plan to kill high-ranking SS officers, sabotage the electricity and communications infrastructure, take the guards’ weapons, loot the armory, arm the other inmates, open the gates, and let people escape and join the partisans. Launched on October 14, 1943, it worked, to an extent. Approximately half of the camp escaped. But only about fifty rebels survived the war. Still, that’s a much higher percentage than would’ve survived otherwise. And of course, there are infinite differences between these cases, but I instantly thought about it when I got the news from my sister, who lived in one of the settlements of the Envelope until October 7, in the family WhatsApp group, saying that their power went out, that there was some kind of sabotage of the electricity infrastructure in the October 7 operation.
In the Shadow of the Holocaust by Masha Gessen, the situation in Gaza is compared to the Warsaw Ghettos. The comparison was also made by a Palestinian poet who was later killed by an Israeli airstrike. Adi Callai has also written on the parallels in his article The Gaza Ghetto Uprising and expanded upon in his corresponding video
Regardless, it doesn’t justify throwing Molotov cocktails at them. That dude was clearly unwell and was lashing out in a completely unacceptable way
That said, the adminstration and legacy media will absolutely weaponize this incident to justify further crackdowns on 1st amendment free speech, on fascist deportations, and criminalizing of pro-palestinian voices
Of course, the main root cause of this kind of escalation of violence is Israel’s live streamed genocide, and frustration from lack of any tangible change surely plays a large role here. Liberal Zionist media is already blaming it instead on the reporting of the genocide itself, instead of the actual genocide.
All of them have been bombed. Most are no longer even partially operational, and even then that’s without the medical supplies also cut off from Israeli’s blockade
Oh, yeah in terms of what expansionist actions Israel can get away with, there’s yet to be a limit. Even at the anger of the US State Dept. Yet America still stays committed to supporting Israel despite how often Israel abuses that partnership, since America still benefits off of the destabilization of the region.
It’s definitely a death cult. Israel’s overzealous expansionist aims are completely unsustainable and will lead to collapse, along with it’s committed ally the US (and maybe some other Western countries)
No, AIPAC does not steer the interests of the State Department. They do all benefit, and AIPAC plays a role in that. My point is that Israel is not the one in control of US foreign policy in the region.
I’m not saying you’re doing this here, but some people try to paint AIPAC as in control of the US as a way to frame the conspiracy theory that ‘Jews control the world,’ as the US is the main superpower globally and has much hegemonic control over the globe. Of course, they also intentionally conflate Judaism and Zionism in that process (which I don’t see you doing here). The reason I stress that AIPAC is not in control of the US State Department, is both because it sidelines the role of the US in the Zionist project since the 60’s, and to dispel that kind of conspiracy theory.
Here, GDF has an in depth analysis on why has and continues to US supports Israel: Part 1 and Part 2. The short answer is money, but the long answer is well worth the watch
because that’s just how much influence and power AIPAC has.
The US government has far more power than Israel, let alone AIPAC, could ever have. We have the largest military force on the planet and hundreds of military bases globally. No country or group is able to use US weapons without the knowledge and support of the US State Department, the use of US weapons that we sell (directly or indirectly) is always to prop up the interests of the State Department in that region. AIPAC has such well established in-roads because of how the US benefits from Israel, and also ideological via Christian Zionism to a lesser extent (which far outnumber Jewish Zionists).
Many in the US are opposed to what Israel is doing, but those people have very little representation in the Federal government
Yes, when I say US, I’m referring specifically to the administrative government, not the populace. Much of what the US does is directly against the will of the populace, and many things, especially on foreign policy, are kept out of public view. Manufacturing Consent has been a critical aspect to keep much of the foreign policy of the US outside the minds of Americans, and to paint the military actions that are shown in a positive light.
The vast majority of Americans want a weapons embargo on Israel. Even the slim majority of Republicans at this point
AIPAC aligns with the interests of the US State Department, it’s not like the US is opposed to what Israel is doing in the region but can’t do anything about it because AIPAC money. The interests are either monetary with the MIC, geopolitical as wielding Israel as an arm of US control over the middle east, and/or ideological with Christian Zionism. They are practically completely dependent on US weapons and support on the international stage, the US is in control in this relationship
14 mil is nothing compared to the 14 bil in weapons sales to Israel alone (it was aid, so we the US taxpayers footed the bill, not Israel), let alone the military contracts to develop tech used on civilian populations. The MIC profits immensely just on the testing of new tech on the Palestinians.
The West Bank has been divided into hundreds of bantustans.
The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other. By its actions, if not always in its rhetoric, Israel has opted for land-grabbing and as we speak Israel is expanding settlements. So, Israel has been systematically destroying the basis for a viable Palestinian state and this is the declared objective of the Likud and Netanyahu who used to pretend to accept a two-state solution. In the lead up to the last election, he said there will be no Palestinian state on his watch. The expansion of settlements and the wall mean that there cannot be a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity. The most that the Palestinians can hope for is Bantustans, a series of enclaves surrounded by Israeli settlements and Israeli military bases.
"Its support – and this includes what is even called the ‘peace camp’ in Israel – for a two-state solution is an idea that says that you do not have to directly control every part of historical Palestine in order to establish your dominance and hegemony between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. So, if you can squeeze the Palestinians into small Bantustans and allow them to have a flag and a semblance of a government, there are quite a few Israelis who do not mind at all, so long as this will be the last and final kind of settlement for the Palestine question. Which means no real political rights for the Palestinians, no right of return for the refugees, and keeping all Palestinians in different parts of historical Palestine, at best as second-rate citizens, at worst, as subjects in an apartheid state.
The reality of the settlements on-the-ground has been the cause of violent resistance and a significant obstacle to peace, as it has been for decades.
This type of settlement, where the native population gets ‘Transferred’ to make room for the settlers, is a long standing practice. See: The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948, the Transfer Committee, and the JNF which led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate, before the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948: Plan Dalet, Declassified Massacres of 1948, and Details of Plan C (May 1946) and Plan D (March 1948) . Further, declassified Israeli documents show that the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip were deliberately planned before being executed in 1967: Haaretz, Forward; while the peace process was exploited to continue de-facto annexation of the West Bank via Settlements (Oslo Accord Sources: MEE, NYT, Haaretz, AJ). The settlements are maintained through a violent apartheid that routinely employs violence towards Palestinians and denies human rights like water access, civil rights, etc. This kind of control gives rise to violent resistance to the Apartheid occupation, jeopardizing the safety of Israeli civilians.j
State violence – official and otherwise – is part and parcel of Israel’s apartheid regime, which aims to create a Jewish-only space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The regime treats land as a resource designed to serve the Jewish public, and accordingly uses it almost exclusively to develop and expand existing Jewish residential communities and to build new ones. At the same time, the regime fragments Palestinian space, dispossesses Palestinians of their land and relegates them to living in small, over-populated enclaves.
The apartheid regime is based on organized, systemic violence against Palestinians, which is carried out by numerous agents: the government, the military, the Civil Administration, the Supreme Court, the Israel Police, the Israel Security Agency, the Israel Prison Service, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, and others. Settlers are another item on this list, and the state incorporates their violence into its own official acts of violence. Settler violence sometimes precedes instances of official violence by Israeli authorities, and at other times is incorporated into them. Like state violence, settler violence is organized, institutionalized, well-equipped and implemented in order to achieve a defined strategic goal.
Leaked Drone Papers