Fascists R Us: Trump and Pompeo’s Deny That Israeli Squatting on Palestinian Land Is Illegal
"Netanyahu takes office in deal that could see West Bank annexation "Israel's Netanyahu, Gantz fail to reach unity deal, deadlock persists "Israel’s opposition leader fails to form coalition government "Netanyahu vows to begin annexing West Bank settlements "Landgrab continues - Israel plans to entrench annexation of East Jerusalem: Report""" " "
A combination of US Evangelical lawlessness and white supremacy with incessant lobbying by the Zionist far right has finally put the United States in the position of supporting the policies of the Axis in World War II.
by Juan Cole Published on Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Pompeo has become Mussolini, in the same way that Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu long since had. (Photo: Guardian Screenshot)
A combination of US Evangelical lawlessness and white supremacy with incessant lobbying by the Zionist far right has finally put the United States in the position of supporting the policies of the Axis in World War II.
That is the historical meaning of Pompeo’s position.
In 1940, Italy’s Mussolini (the idol of Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist) grabbed Nice from France .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_occupation_of_France . Mussolini intended to permanently annex this territory, and had designs on the port city of Marseilles, as well.
-- Given that the whole creation of the international-law category of war crimes with the Geneva Conventions was in part intended to ensure that never again could the Jewish people be genocided, it is a supreme and ugly irony that no one has done more to undermine and destroy international law concerning occupied populations than the State of Israel. --
Do you think that is right, that Mussolini could just march into France and gobble up part of it? What kind of world would it be if Mussolinis were constantly stealing other people’s territory?
When Mussolini was defeated (and shot to death by a leftist partisan in 1945), the non-Fascist countries created the United Nations and enacted the Geneva Conventions to try to stop Mussolini-like behavior in the future.
The United Nations Charter forbids any country to acquire the territory of others by military force. It is illegal for Italy to march into France and just take Nice for itself.
Mussolini’s imperialism did not stop at the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1911 Italy had launched a war of aggression on Libya and made it a colony. But it wasn’t enough to rule the lives of Libyans with a fascist iron fist and to steal their resources. Beginning in 1938 and continuing into WW II, Mussolini began sending Italians in to Occupied Libya.
Wikipedia notes,
"A project initiated by Libya’s governor, Italo Balbo, brought the first 20,000 settlers — the “Ventimila” – to Libya in a single convoy in October 1938. More settlers followed in 1939, and by 1940 there were approximately 110,000 Italians in Libya, constituting about 12 percent of the total population.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_imperialism_under_Fascism
Plans envisioned an Italian colony of 500,000 settlers by the 1960s: so, the Italians would be 2/3 of the population in coastal Libya by then. Libya’s best land was allocated to the settlers to be brought under productive cultivation, primarily in olive groves.”
After World War II, not only was aggressively annexing your neighbor’s land made illegal but so too was flooding your own population into an Occupied territory to deprive locals of the fruits of their own resources and grab them for the metropole.
The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 governs the treatment of populations in Occupied territories during wartime, and it forbids transplanting people from the Occupying Power’s population into the subjected region. Remember, the United Nations Charter envisages that at the cessation of hostilities, the Occupier would have to give back the territory. It cannot be annexed.
Article 49, Fourth Geneva Convention, says, “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies.”
So here’s the thing. There isn’t any difference in this regard between the Israeli government and Mussolini. Just as Mussolini invaded and annexed Nice and Corsica, the Israelis invaded Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, at a time when the civilian Palestinian population was not militarized and not directly involved in the Egyptian-Jordanian-Syrian war with Israel. Israel has annexed large tracts of the Palestinian West Bank.
And it has flooded some 600,000 squatters into Palestine (not to mention all the squatters around Jerusalem on annexed territory), just as Mussolini sent all those Italians into Libya. This is just naked aggression and colonialism.
Israelis like to take the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan for British Mandate Palestine as their charter of legitimacy, even though the UNGA does not have any legal authority to decide such things. But even so, that plan did not award the West Bank and Gaza to Israel, and that denial was implicit in the 1949 Armistice among the belligerents.
Given that the whole creation of the international-law category of war crimes with the Geneva Conventions was in part intended to ensure that never again could the Jewish people be genocided, it is a supreme and ugly irony that no one has done more to undermine and destroy international law concerning occupied populations than the State of Israel.
The official policy of the United States is now that it is all right to annex neighbors’ land and to settle it with your own squatters.
Pompeo has become Mussolini, in the same way that Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu long since had.
Ezra Pound began his Pisan Canto LXXIV lamenting the death of “Ben” Mussolini, hung by his heels. The US military wanted to execute him for his active support of Italian Fascism. In turn, it was the aggressive militarism and severe human rights abuses of the fascist Italian state that provoked that animus.
I know what Gen. Patton and Gen. Omar Bradley and Gen. Ike Eisenhower thought of Mussolini. I know what they would think of Pompeo running up the white flag of surrender to Fascist policy.
We have met the Fascists and they are us. Juan Cole
Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His new book, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation Is Changing the Middle East (Simon and Schuster), will officially be published July 1st. He is also the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (both Palgrave Macmillan). He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.
Coronavirus update: Israeli protesters accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of botching pandemic response
"Netanyahu takes office in deal that could see West Bank annexation "Israel's Netanyahu, Gantz fail to reach unity deal, deadlock persists "
Posted 11 hours ago, updated 53 minutes ago
[...]
Israeli demonstrators accuse Netanyahu of mishandling pandemic
Thousands of Israelis have held a demonstration outside the Jerusalem residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as anger mounts over corruption allegations and his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
[...]
Brazil COVID-19 death toll to surpass 100,000
Brazil's death toll from COVID-19 is expected to hit 100,000 on Saturday (local time) and continue to climb as most Brazilian cities reopen shops and dining even though the pandemic has yet to peak.
[...]
UK orders recall of 741,000 coronavirus testing kits over safety concerns
Randox Laboratories, a Northern Ireland-based medical technology company, has been instructed by Britain's medicines regulator to recall up to 741,000 coronavirus test kits from the national test and trace programme as a precautionary measure.
[...]
South Africa's confirmed coronavirus deaths surpass 10,000
South Africa has surpassed 10,000 confirmed deaths from coronavirus.
South Africa has the fifth-most coronavirus cases in the world.(AP: Brian Inganga, file pho
[...]
Ukraine closes checkpoints at Crimean border to control coronavirus
Ukraine's Government has temporarily closed its border with Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, to prevent further spread of coronavirus.
All three crossing points between the mainland and Crimea, which is defined by Ukraine as an occupied territory, will be closed from August 9 to August 30, a Government statement said.
Only Crimean residents with Ukrainian citizenship will be allowed to enter Crimea.
[...]
Czechs record biggest daily jump in coronavirus cases since April 3
The Czech Republic has recorded its biggest daily rise in new coronavirus cases since April 3 due to local outbreaks in a number of regions.
The central European country of 10.7 million recorded 323 new cases on Friday (local time), health ministry data showed, bringing the total number of cases detected to 18,060.
[...]
Children back to school in Gaza after five-month shutdown
Hundreds of thousands of children have walked through the streets of the Gaza Strip to return to classes after five months of shutdown.
Authorities said they were ready to close schools again if coronavirus cases spike.
Health workers will sanitise Gaza's 751 schools twice a day and outdoor breaks are banned. (AP: Adel Hana, file)
Gaza, mostly cut off from the world by an Israeli-led blockade, has not recorded any COVID-19 cases in the towns and refugee camps where around 2 million Palestinians live.
The territory's Islamist Hamas-run education ministry shut down schools in March and students completed the remainder of the school year online in fear any outbreak would overwhelm the health system.
Health workers will sanitise Gaza's 751 schools twice a day and children do not have to wear masks but must bring their own lunch and outdoor breaks are banned.
Plans were already in place to halt classes should the virus spread into Gaza's densely-populated towns.
About 40 kilometres away in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, which has reported a spike in COVID-19 cases, high school classes began this week but elementary schools remain closed.
West Bank health officials have reported 94 deaths and 13,600 cases, most of them in the past two months.
Around-the-halls: Experts analyze the normalization of Israel-UAE ties
"Netanyahu takes office in deal that could see West Bank annexation"
Natan Sachs, Bruce Riedel, Jeffrey Feltman, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Suzanne Maloney, Shadi Hamid, and Salam Fayyad
Thursday, August 13, 2020
Order from Chaos
On August 13, Israel and United Arab Emirates (UAE) struck a major diplomatic agreement, with a joint Israel-UAE-U.S. statement .. https://translations.state.gov/2020/08/13/joint-statement-of-the-united-states-the-state-of-israel-and-the-united-arab-emirates/ .. announcing that in exchange for “full normalization of relations” between the two countries, Israel would forgo, for now, “declaring sovereignty” over disputed territory in the West Bank. Brookings experts on the Middle East analyze the news and its implications.
Natan Sachs (@natansachs), Director and Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: Normalization between Israel and the UAE is an excellent thing, in and of itself. It’s high time these countries have open, normal relations. But the context is of course key: the Israeli plan to annex parts of the West Bank, along the lines to be delineated by the U.S. and Israel after the release of Trump administration plan. The UAE-Israeli-U.S. deal allows everyone to climb down: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can avoid the terrible mistake of annexation while claiming he got something big for it (he did!). The UAE can claim it prevented annexation from happening — from UAE Ambassador Yousef Otaiba’s Hebrew-language op-ed warning of the move, to the big carrot of diplomatic normalization. Trump gets to avoid the annexation he himself sanctioned, and all the complications it could have produced, while showing a big win for two of his favorite allies.
There is, of course, something odd about rewarding a non-blunder. Annexation could have been (and perhaps already was) avoided easily with a decision in Washington or Jerusalem alone, but the countries can now move forward with what they’ve long wanted: cooperation among two often-like minded countries, with common regional concerns.
The losers, as often, are the Palestinians. The impatience in the Gulf with the Palestinians now comes to full daylight. The Gulf won’t wait for them any longer, asking of Israel only to avoid declarations of a major change to the status quo.
A question is whether anyone else, and especially the Saudis, might follow. For now, though, the camp of Arab countries with peace or normalization with Israel grows to four: following Egypt (1977), Jordan (1994), and Lebanon, whose nominal leaders signed a meaningless peace treaty with Israel during the Israeli invasion in 1983. This latest agreement to normalize is not nearly as consequential as the first two. Hopefully it will have more meaning than the latter one.
[... there are some sorta similar others stating the obvious. To these last two which are more on the mark ...]
Shadi Hamid (@shadihamid), Senior Fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy: In theory, who can argue against peace? In practice and principle, though, Israel is being rewarded for not doing something it should have never considered doing in the first place — annexing parts of the West Bank. This isn’t diplomacy, and it isn’t peace. It’s cynical, and it shows, once again, that Arab authoritarian regimes can’t be bothered to pretend they care about Palestinian rights. For the UAE, it’s a means to an end, formalizing increasingly warm feelings toward Israel, due to their shared enemy of Iran and their shared (and unusual) preference for President Trump over President Obama.
The word “authoritarian” is worth highlighting here. It’s hard to imagine an Arab country, if it were democratic, striking a peace deal with Israel today. Whether that’s a strike against — or for — democracy is another question. Of course, it’s not exactly an accident that Israel, one of the region’s few democracies, prefers that its Arab neighbors not be democratic, and the deal with the UAE is a reminder why.
Salam Fayyad, Distinguished Fellow in the Foreign Policy program: Yet another sign of bad times. Little did Arab leaders know, when they adopted the Arab Peace Initiative some 18 years ago, that normalization for withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories would turn into normalization for a mere suspension — read: deferment to a more opportune time — of further formal annexation of West Bank territory. Israel got itself a huge prize for merely temporarily refraining from committing another egregious violation of international law.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
