Opinion Archives - Page 10 of 39

Israel’s War on Truth

CrossFireArabia
August 20, 2025

The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza on August 10 has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no substantive action. This has become the predictable and horrifying trajectory of the international community’s response to the ongoing Israeli genocide.

By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.

More journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a “terrorist”. This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli officials in the past, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza “is responsible” for not having rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent people in Gaza.

This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes entire populations based on a vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve their country’s image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, callously argued that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels,” implying that all of Gaza is a valid military target.

This cruelty of language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric, except that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports, destroyed over 70 per cent of Gaza’s infrastructure.

While extremist language is often used by politicians around the world, it is rare for the extremism of the language to so precisely mirror the extremism of the action itself. This makes Israeli political discourse a uniquely dangerous phenomenon.

There can be no military justification for the wholesale annihilation of an entire region. Yet again, the Israelis are not shying away from providing the political discourse that explains this unprecedented destruction. Former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin chillingly said, last May, that “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not a single Gazan child will be left there.

But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals, journalists, artists and poets. While children and women remain the largest categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society, deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding Gaza impossible.

These figures powerfully illustrate this point: according to a report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, based on the latest satellite damage assessment conducted in July, 97 per cent of Gaza’s educational facilities have been affected, with 91 per cent in need of major repairs or full reconstruction. Additionally, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been killed.

But why is Israel so intent on killing those responsible for intellectual production? The answer is twofold: one unique to Gaza, and the other unique to the nature of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism.

First, regarding Gaza: Since the Nakba in 1948, Palestinian society in Gaza has invested heavily in education, seeing it as a crucial tool for liberation and self-determination. Early footage shows classrooms being held in tents and open spaces, a testament to this community’s tenacious pursuit of knowledge. This focus on education transformed the Strip into a regional hub for intellectual and cultural production, despite poorly funded UNRWA schools. Israel’s campaign of destruction is a deliberate attempt to erase this generational achievement, a practice known as scholasticide, and Gaza is the most deliberate example of this horrific act.

Second, regarding Zionism: For many years, we were led to believe that Zionism was winning the intellectual war due to the cleverness and refinement of Israeli propaganda, or hasbara. The prevailing narrative, particularly in the Arab world, was that Palestinians and Arabs were simply no match for the savvy Israeli and pro-Israeli public relations machine in Western media. This created a sense of intellectual inferiority, masking the true reason for the imbalance.

Israel was able to “win” in mainstream media discourse due to the intentional marginalisation and demonisation of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. The latter had no chance of fighting back simply because they were not allowed to, and were instead labeled as “terrorist sympathizers” and the like. Even the late, world-renowned Palestinian scholar Edward Said was called a “Nazi” by the extremist, now-banned Jewish Defense League, who went so far as to set the beloved professor’s university office on fire.

Gaza, however, represented a major problem. With foreign media forbidden from operating in the Strip per Israeli orders, the Gazan intellectual rose to the occasion and, in the course of two years, managed to reverse most of Zionism’s gains over the past century. This forced Israel into a desperate race against time to remove as many Palestinian journalists, intellectuals, academics, and even social media influencers from the scene as quickly as possible—thus, the war on the Palestinian thinker.

The Israeli logic, however, is destined to fail, as ideas are not tied to specific individuals, and resilience and resistance are a culture, not a job title. Gaza shall once more emerge, not only as the culturally thriving place it has always been, but as the cornerstone of a new liberation discourse that is set to inspire the globe regarding the power of intellect to stand firm, to fight for what is right, and to live with purpose for a higher cause.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

Jordan Times

Opinion

Gaza and Hiroshima: The US Connection

CrossFireArabia
August 16, 2025

By Maung Zarni

An aerial view of Gaza City as the efforts to drop humanitarian aid supplies through parachute by military cargo planes into the city continues on August 6, 2025.

As evidenced from the freshly emerging videos and photos, Gaza’s physical landscape today resembles Hiroshima on the morning of Aug. 7, 1945, just as Israel’s mass killing of Palestinians of all ages is the direct, intended outcome by Israel’s planners of this “war for annihilation” of an entire Palestinian society mirrored by the near-total destruction of the physical infrastructure that sheltered the 2.3 million Palestinians at the start of the war on Oct. 8, 2023.

The vastly undercounted deaths of over 60,000 – of whom more than 16,000 were babies, and children – by the Gaza Health Ministry must be paired with the staggering number 377,000, a number presented by Dr. Yaakov Garb, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as “missing” Gazans (presumed dead and buried under dozens of tons of rubble of bombed out Gazan buildings).

Let’s also not forget that Israel had allowed Gaza to exist as its “open-air prison,” to use the term publicly uttered by retired Israeli Navy Adm. Ami Ayalon who also served as the chief of Shin Bet, or Shabek, which runs Gaza like prison guards, since 2007. That was the year when Hamas became the elected government of the 45-kilometer (28-mile) strip along the hydrocarbon-rich Mediterranean Sea, something Israel eyes with its characteristic lust for land and resources.

Chillingly, the common element here is that both Hiroshima and Gaza have been variously vaporized by American weapons.

Obviously, the estimated 80,000 tons of explosives delivered through Made-in-USA 500 and 1,000 kg bombs – all provided by bipartisan Washington – and dropped from F-35s almost daily and nightly over 660 days, could do a similar degree of physical destruction as then-US President Harry S Truman’s bombs did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Who needs atomic bombs to destroy Gaza?

Here worth noting is the fact that the American creator of history’s first-ever atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the German-trained professor of theoretical physics at the flagship campus of the University of California, in Berkeley, was capable of the painful and honest self-reflection that “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Alas, there is absolutely no sign of such capacity for honest soul-searching amongst the American political leaders and their foreign policy advisors: the United States continues to be the destroyer of worlds – that is, other peoples’ worlds (wholesale societies, countries, and nations), from the Korean Peninsula to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to throughout the Muslim Middle East of Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and now Gaza and all of the occupied Palestine, as well as Latin America.

In the early autumn of 2016, I visited Hiroshima with an old British friend of mine, Professor Edward Vickers, whose father is a retired Royal Air Force pilot. Ed resides in Japan with his Japanese partner and their children. I was in Kyoto for a small international seminar on comparative cases of genocidal violence, where I presented my main research theme of my own “Buddhist” country’s genocide against Rohingya people, still ongoing to date.

I decided to take a long train journey from Kyoto to Hiroshima and asked Ed to join me at Hiroshima, a place we had both wanted to go. For me, Hiroshima has long had a personal ring: the extended American family (of two sisters, both of whom did their undergraduate degrees at Oppenheimer’s university when the man was on the faculty of physics) which practically adopted me as a young foreign graduate student in Northern California was entangled in the Manhattan Project. The older sister got a job at Los Alamos National Lab where the bomb was developed, specifically as Oppenheimer’s personal secretary. As a matter of fact, her boss walked her down the aisle at a small chapel established for the thousands of project workers as she fell in love with and married a young scientist working on the project.

If it weren’t for the name Hiroshima and our historical knowledge it triggers, we would see neither the traces of the old Hiroshima nor the evidence of the first atomic bomb’s impact on the physical and natural environment.

Israel’s genocidal patron, namely the leaderships of the United States, have shown an utter and complete lack of human empathy, conscience, or regard for the post-Hiroshima, post-Holocaust international law, which they helped create.

The United States has long become death, and destroyer of the worlds, while its corporate political class continues to celebrate its power of annihilation and seeks to send the message that they will continue to destroy the world, natural and human, in order to rule over it. George Orwell got one thing wrong: war is profit (for corporate masters of our universe), not peace. For that reason alone, I am not so sure that we can be optimistic about Gaza’s reconstruction a la post-war Hiroshima, even as a Trumpian dystopian riviera on the unmarked mass graves of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians exterminated in their extended families over two or three generations.

As Rev. Dr Munther Isaac, the renowned Palestinian theologian of Shepherd’s Field, Bethlehem, said in his recent address to the Churches for the Middle East Peace Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, US, the ongoing US-Israel’s joint mass extermination campaign against his fellow people in Gaza (and the West Bank) is the clearest indication of the total collapse of the current moral order of this post-Holocaust world.

In Isaac’s words, “Never again!” is really “Yet again!” while the Zionized Imperialists have integrated elements of both Auschwitz (closed on Jan. 27, 1945) and Hiroshima (destroyed on Aug. 6, 1945) in their annihilation of Gaza, both the physical environment and residential human population. Isaac continued: “The law (now) protects the perpetrators of genocide in Gaza while punishing those who oppose (this crime against humanity.”

In passing, I will point out that even the relentless attempts to deny, defy, and erase truths about the US and Israel by the planners, executioners and supporters of the genocide in Gaza have a precedent in the way the United States as the occupying military power in Tokyo handled the atomic bomb survivors’ attempts to document and tell the factual truths about what the Americans did with it in a single morning at 8.15 am on Aug. 6, 1945.

Fast forward to 2025

The destroyers of Gaza today see themselves as God’s chosen people with the divine right to perpetrate a Holocaust of their own against the largely Muslim population of Palestine, whose land they have stolen to build “the Jewish national homeland,” under the imperial patronage of first Britain and now the US. There are daily crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide in Gaza by US and Israel over 660 mornings – and still counting.

So expect these two states to become even more shrill and extreme as they struggle to exterminate factual truths about their victim-livestreamed crimes against Palestinians, specifically, the bogus “antisemitism” laws as defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) run by the Jewish Supremacist or Jewish Exceptionalist working for the genocidal state of Israel.

*The author is co-founder of the Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia and a Myanmar genocide scholar and a UK-exiled Myanmar dissident. His Opinions do not necessarily reflect Anadolu’s editorial policy.

Opinion

Israel and The Lunatic Fringe

Dr Khairi Janbek
August 14, 2025

By Dr Khairi Janbek

So long as the fringe remains a fringe, it can be managed, controlled and probably defeated. But the problem arises when the fringe starts to be defined as a wider being and acting as mainstream.

Case in mind, a fringe political and philosophical movement emerged in the West calling itself as the Dark Renaissance, in other words, a movement attacking the concepts of the Renaissance as the cause of the ills of European civilization.

It says that democracy, equality and human rights concepts should be totally erased, and equal opportunities should not be the norm of ruling societies, rather technology governed by a group of technocrats should be ruling the world.

Moreover, all countries and nations are not equal, therefore strong countries and stronger nations should tell the weaker ones what to do and how to behave.

Now as one said from the start, this was a fringe movement, but unfortunately, the fringe has become the mainstream in international power politics.

The Israeli government has started talking about the question of “greater Israel” but indeed, one thinks as many others do, that this is nothing but an illusion. At the same time, and from the perspective of the western dark renaissance, one wonders to what extent Israel will have support for this illusion in the worst case scenario, and total indifference in the best case scenario.

The current Israeli government is resorting to the rhetoric of the pre-creation Israel, and acting as if the peace treaties and normalisation with Arab countries are nothing but a stepping stone to its dreams of conquest.

Now, how will the world power brokers react to the Israeli Magaly ideas, as in fact they were the guarantors of Arab-Israeli peace agreements and normalisation processes is to be fowned upon. More interestingly, one wonders how the main world power brokers would have reacted, had the Arab countries facing up to Israeli delusions, using the same rhetoric it was using before the creation of its state of Israel prior to 1948.

From what it seems, Israel can say what it likes, and dream as it wishes, but the Arabs can neither talk nor even dare of dreaming.

One wonders about the objectives of this “greater Israel” talk by the Israeli government. The only thing that one concludes is that the Israeli government is trying to throw around big plans and projects in order to cover up other plans involving the West Bank and Gaza, so that at the end of the day, it can say I am giving concessions regarding my greater Israel plans, but each concession Israel gives, is a slap in Arab faces.

Dr Janbek is a Jordanian writer based in Paris. France

Opinion

Can Netanyahu Reshape The Middle East?

CrossFireArabia
August 8, 2025

By Mohammad Abu Rumman

What happened on October 7th was not merely a surprise, bloody attack for Israel—it marked a watershed moment that redefined its security doctrine and the limits of its regional project. It was a moment strikingly similar to what the events of September 11th represented for the United States. Immediately after the launch of the Al Aqsa Flood operation, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasted no time in drawing a direct comparison to 9/11.

This comparison was not just rhetorical or meant to rally emotions. It reflects a much deeper strategic vision. Netanyahu is using the shock of the attack to advance an old-new Israeli project: restructuring the region’s security and political landscape in a way that guarantees Israel near-absolute security in a demilitarised environment, free of any threats.

After the 9/11 attacks, US neoconservatives in the White House seized the moment to implement the “Project for the New American Century”—a vision developed by think tanks and figures like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol and Robert Kagan. Founded in 1997, the project aimed to reshape the global order and maintain American dominance, with Iraq, Syria, and Iran at the heart of its ambitions. September 11th became the ideal pretext to accelerate this vision through the invasion of Iraq and redrawing the map of the Middle East.

Today, Netanyahu is doing something strikingly similar. He sees the Al Aqsa Flood as a historic opportunity to accelerate his own regional vision—one that is no longer confined to Gaza but extends to southern Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Gaza again, and even the political dynamics in Turkey and several Arab states.

Those following Netanyahu’s rhetoric—and that of his ministers—can clearly see that Israel is no longer content with merely deterring its enemies. It now seeks to re-engineer the entire geopolitical landscape of the region. In southern Syria, Netanyahu stated clearly: “We will not allow any military forces threatening our borders to remain in southern Syria, and we will not return to the old equation.” Defence minister Yoav Gallant added that Israel will reshape the reality there to ensure its strategic security—which essentially means preventing the Syrian army from returning to its previous positions and enforcing a safe corridor between Sweida and the Golan Heights in line with Israeli interests.

In Lebanon, the objective has shifted from merely weakening Hizbollah to explicitly disarming the group entirely and eliminating its missile capabilities, which pose a direct threat to Israel.

In Gaza, the discussion is no longer about reconstruction or humanitarian relief. The conversation centers on the “day after”—meaning the complete removal of Hamas, disarmament of all resistance forces, and transforming Gaza into a powerless entity under full Israeli security control.

Even the proposed Palestinian state mentioned in the recent New York declaration is envisioned as a demilitarized one—to appease Netanyahu. Yet, he still won’t accept it. Israel has already moved past the idea of any sovereign Palestinian state. What’s “allowed”, according to current Israeli thinking, are fragmented cantons and voluntary or forced displacement of Palestinians.

As for Iran, Israel’s confrontation with Tehran is open-ended, aiming to reduce its missile capabilities and eliminate its strategic threat. It is also plausible that Israel’s strategic vision may extend to shaping the political scene in Turkey—possibly by pushing for a government more aligned with Israeli interests—and exerting pressure on certain Arab states, even those officially labeled as “friendly” to Tel Aviv.

This project is no longer tied to Netanyahu’s personal political survival. It has become close to a national consensus among Israeli institutions and political elites. Leaders like Yair Lapid or Naftali Bennett are unlikely to reverse course or return Israel to the pre-October 8th status quo.

What’s unfolding today isn’t a series of short-term security tactics. It’s a long-term strategic plan aimed at reshaping the regional balance of power and cementing Israel’s status as the undisputed regional superpower.

The author is a columnist for the Jordan Times

Opinion

Trump, Witkoff Need To Stop The Netanyahu Tune

CrossFireArabia
August 7, 2025

By Michael Jansen

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has said, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza.” Israel has enabled “humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza – otherwise, there would be no Gazans.”

However, Gaza’s government media office told Al-Jazeera that only 674 aid trucks have entered Gaza since Israel eased restrictions on July 27, averaging just 84 laden trucks per day. This is only 14 per cent of needs as humanitarian organisations say at least 600 trucks of water, food, medicine and fuel are required at a minimum.

Echoing Netanyahu, US regional envoy Steve Wikoff proclaimed there is “no starvation” in Gaza after a brief visit to one of the aid delivery hubs in the Strip. “There is hardship but no starvation,” he said. His assessment appeared to contradict his boss Donald Trump who had said there is “real starvation.”

“Once we refute this Hamas claim, we can continue new actions to end the war and bring back all the hostages” held by Hamas, Witkoff said. He added that Trump believes piecemeal deals do not work and so a new arrangement is needed that would free the hostages all at once.

However, Witkoff argued that only Hamas “total surrender” and disarmament would be accepted. Writing in Haaretz daily on 2 August, Amir Tibon decries Netanyahu’s decision to carry on with the war, despite opposition from most Israelis and Israel’s foreign friends. “Israel’s military leadership admits today that the last five months have been a wasted effort, and that it would have been preferable for Israel to continue the January 2025 ceasefire, get the rest of the hostages out of Gaza in an agreement, and conclude the war.”

He is sharply critical of the Trump administration which “gave Netanyahu total backing for this disastrous policy, including his decision to block all aid from coming into Gaza, which caused the humanitarian crisis there. “Consequently, Witkoff’s latest visit has been met with popular Israeli “disappointment over the Trump administration’s failure to rein in Netanyahu and bring the Gaza war to an end.”

This means that there will be no quick fix under pressure from starvation even though Israelis held captive by Hamas are suffering the same lack of nourishment as their captors. The International Committee of the Red Cross has been asked to provide food for the captives but not the 2.3 million hungry Palestinians in Gaza.

Witkoff has been contradicted by the UN-supported Integrated Food Security Phase Classification” (IPC) which has warned that “the worse-case scenario of famine” is unfolding as 60,000 Palestinians died from bombs and bullets and an untold toll, especially among children, is being gripped by hunger and malnourishment. IPC called for a ceasefire to avert further “catastrophic human suffering.” The total number of people who have died from hunger-related causes since the start of the war in October 2023 has risen to more than 181, including 94 children. This does not include the 1,400 who have been killed by Israeli army fire when trying to secure aid at the highly controversial US-Israel Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which has not alleviated starvation but given a false image of US and Israeli efforts to deliver food.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the IPC alert “confirms what we have heard. The facts are in and they are undeniable. Palestinians in Gaza are enduring a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions. This is not a warning. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared it was “beyond comprehension” for Israel to claim starvation was not an issue in Gaza and accused Israel of breaching international law by blocking aid.

Netanyahu is personally responsible for torpedoing January’s ceasefire agreement which would have led to the release of Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, Israel military withdrawal from Gaza, and an end to the war. Instead on 2 March, he imposed the blockade and on 18 March, he resumed the war. Tibon summed up, “Netanyahu, for political reasons, chose to blow up the deal, restart the war, and bring us to where we are today: Our hostages are being starved and tortured, our soldiers are dying, and the entire world is turning against us due to the broader humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

As the 15 August 20th anniversary approaches of the beginning of Israel’s withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza, 600 retired Israeli security officials have written to Trump to ask him to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. This group included former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and former Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon.

Ayalon argued: “At first this war was a just war, a defensive war, but when we achieved all military objectives, this war ceased to be a just war…It is our professional judgement that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel,” the officials stated. “Your credibility with the vast majority of Israelis augments your ability to steer [Netanyahu] and his government in the right direction: End the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering.”

On the political front, this policy has contributed to decisions by Britain, France, Canada and half a dozen other countries to recognize the state of Palestine during next month’s opening of the 80th UN General Assembly session. Although recognized by 147 of the 193 UN members, many Western countries have delayed recognition. The addition of Britain and France will mean four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (which includes China and Russia) will recognize Palestine while the US will remain the outlier as it is on any effort to criticize or rein in Israel.

Michael Jansen is a columnist for The Jordan Times