May 16, 2024

DWF NEWS List of Articles for 5/16/24 

CNN investigation finds Israel guilty of unthinkable torture

Report: Israeli Prisons Subject Palestinians to Constant Torture, "Revenge"

Sharon Zhang 

US Politicians Threaten to Invade International Criminal Court if Israel Faces War Crimes

Ben Norton

A Culture of War That Hates Youth

Norman Solomon

Reviving the Concept of Trusteeship as a Stepping Stone to Peace in the Middle East

Sovaida Maani Ewing   Citizens for Global Solutions

A New Jewishness Is Being Born Before Our Eyes

Will Alden      The Nation

Starvation as a Weapon of War, Gaza and Elsewhere

SM Sharei    Center for UN Constitutional Research

CNN investigation finds Israel guilty of unthinkable torture

Report: Israeli Prisons Subject Palestinians to Constant Torture, "Revenge"

Sharon Zhang 

 EXCERPTS

“[The beatings] were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge.”

Palestinians imprisoned en masse without charges by Israeli forces are subject to constant torture, amputations due to prolonged confinement, and “revenge” beatings in an Israeli prison camp established after October 7, a harrowing new report by CNN reveals.

Three Israeli whistleblowers spoke of the horrific conditions imposed by Israeli soldiers at the Sde Teiman camp, which is located in the desert, 18 miles from Gaza. There, among other detention facilities, Palestinians are constantly blindfolded and handcuffed with zip ties. In one facility, they are forced to sit on the ground in painful positions; in a field hospital, they are forced to strip down and are strapped to beds, wearing only diapers.

The whistleblowers described horrific, inhumane conditions in the prisons. Sometimes, Palestinians are forced to have limbs amputated due to injuries sustained from being handcuffed for long periods of time. These and other medical procedures are often done without anesthesia and by people without training, the report found. The camp — which is said to smell of wounds left to rot by unqualified medics — has a reputation for being “a paradise for interns.”  READ MORE             

Antisocial Personality Disorder reveals itself, violent psychopaths?

US Politicians Threaten to Invade International Criminal Court if Israel Faces War Crimes

Ben Norton

US government officials have threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague, telling its Prosecutor Karim Khan that if he issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials over their war crimes in Gaza, the US government could impose sanctions on him, other ICC personnel, and their family members.

US senators even threatened to invade the Hague if it tries to prosecute Israeli officials.

This April, Israel’s extreme-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a prominent member of the state security cabinet, called for “total annihilation” of Gaza. Smotrich cited the Biblical nation of Amalek – a genocidal reference also made by far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

These invocations of Amalek are clear calls for genocide. In the Book of Samuel, God orders King Saul, “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys”.   READ MORE

A Culture of War That Hates Youth

Norman Solomon

Young people — least inclined to deference, most inclined to moral outrage — are leading public opposition to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The campus upheaval is a clash between accepting and resisting, while elites insist on doing maintenance work for the war machine.

This spring, as students have risked arrest and jeopardized their college careers under banners like “Ceasefire Now,” “Free Palestine” and “Divest from Israel,” they’ve rejected some key unwritten rules of a death culture.

From Congress to the White House, war (and the military-industrial complex that goes with it) is crucial for the political business model. Meanwhile, college trustees and alumni megadonors often have investment ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, where war is a multibillion-dollar enterprise.

Along the way, weapons sales to Israel and many other countries bring in gigantic profits. The new campus uprisings are a shock to the war system. Managers of that system, constantly oiling its machinery, have no column for moral revulsion on their balance sheets.

Like many others in the United States, protesting students are now struggling with the realization that the people in control of the executive and legislative branches are directly supporting mass murder and genocide.

In late April, when overwhelming bipartisan votes in Congress approved — and President Biden eagerly signed — a bill sending $17 billion in military aid to Israel, the only way to miss the utter depravity of those atop the government was to not really look, or to remain in the thrall of a dominant death culture.

“The emerging mass uprisings must persist and diversify and broaden in focus and reach. And hey, on your campuses, again do better than us. Fight to divest but also fight to structurally change them so their decision makers — which should be you — never again invest in genocide, war, and indeed suppression and oppression of any kind. Tomorrow is the first day of a long, long potentially incredibly liberating future. But one day is but one day. Persist.”

Persistence will be truly essential. The gears of pro-Israel forces are fully meshed with the U.S. war machinery. The movement to stop Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinians is up against the entire military-industrial-congressional complex.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies), while maintaining 750 military bases overseas, vastly more than all of its official adversaries put together.  READ MORE

https://rootsaction.org/news-a-views/3362-war-culture-hates-the-ethical-passion-of-the-young

Reviving the Concept of Trusteeship as a Stepping Stone to Peace in the Middle East

Sovaida Maani Ewing   Citizens for Global Solutions 

EXCERPTS

Like it or not, our world has become so interconnected and interdependent that events that have hitherto been regarded as regional in nature now threaten our well-being everywhere. The Ukraine war triggered global food and energy crises, global inflation, exacerbated the worldwide refugee crisis, and renewed the specter of a nuclear war.

The war in Gaza has added to these woes by sparking reactions that threaten global shipping through the Suez Canal, putting a further dent in our global economy by raising consumer prices. We must act swiftly and effectively now to stem the cancerous spread of violence before we find ourselves engulfed in a global conflagration. 

The international community must step up and shoulder a responsibility it has, for too long, abdicated: to maintain and restore peace in the world. We can begin by going beyond mere words and adopting mechanisms to operationalize and implement a principle known as the Responsibility to Protect, adopted unanimously by 193 nations at the UN Summit of world leaders in 2005. It provides that if a government is unable or unwilling to protect its people, it falls to the international community to step in and shoulder that responsibility.

A mechanism that is worth considering along these lines is that of making Gaza an international trust for a limited period of time until it is ready for self-governance. Even if there is no appetite to revive the Trusteeship Council, an organ of the United Nations which was suspended (though not dismantled) in 1994, we can revive and apply its attributes to create this trust as a stepping-stone for peace in the Middle East.

We should urge the UN General Assembly to create an ad hoc Trusteeship Council that would act as a time-limited cocoon (say of 5 years) around Gaza, allowing it to heal at all levels until it is able to take up its role as a mature member of the international community of nations. The case of South West Africa’s evolution to becoming Namibia provides us with a useful precedent for setting up such an ad hoc Council and warns us of pitfalls to avoid.  READ MORE

[This article was originally published in PeaceVoice. Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the official policy of Citizens for Global Solutions.]

A New Jewishness Is Being Born Before Our Eyes

Will Alden      The Nation

 EXCERPTS

Last Friday evening, amid the national panic over the campus protests in solidarity with Gaza, I met fellow Jews in downtown Los Angeles to welcome Shabbat. Candles, grape juice, and challah shared space with “CEASEFIRE NOW” signs on a folding table. We heard speeches and joined together in song and prayer as the sun dipped behind the Department of Water and Power Building and the wind blew through.

A new Jewish tradition is growing in those places where solidarity flourishes. Amid the ugliness and death, and as our institutions cleave to the mistaken idea that our safety comes from ever more brutal applications of state power, the future of our people is being written on campuses and in the streets. Thousands of Jews of all ages are creating something better than what we inherited. Our new Jewish tradition prioritizes truth-telling and justice, and in this way it is actually the old Jewish tradition, which has given us all the tools we’re using.

... a medical administrator at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who asked that I not use her last name—she is Muslim and fears harassment—told me that the Kabbalat Shabbat service was her first-ever experience of Friday-evening Shabbat. (The Shabbat downtown, where we met a week later, was her second.) “There were Muslims sitting down with Jews. There were Christians sitting down. We were just learning about it,” Aliyah recalled. “And at the same time, Muslims had their prayers.” (The daily prayers of Islam appeared alongside Jewish ritual on the agenda.) “It was beautiful.”  READ MORE

Starvation as a Weapon of War, Gaza and Elsewhere

S.M. Sharei Center for UN Constitutional Research

 Editor: The Center for UN Constitutional Research (CUNCR, Brussels) is a leading advocate calling for a review under Article 109 of the UN Charter. The Charter's deficiencies are so deep that the UN cannot prevent or stop war, or enforce international law.

Surprisingly, the Charter actually protects from criminal prosecution the leaders of Bully nations (UN Security Council's P-5 veto powers and their allies) who may be responsible for war crimes. We see this travesty of justice in the genocide unfolding in Gaza -- the trapped civilian Palestinian population being shot, bombed and starved.

Israel and US leaders responsible for these world crimes will not be indicted, protected by the US veto granted by the Charter. Their arrogance is so great that they violently threaten the International Criminal Court if the ICC dares to indict them! 

The Earth Constitution waits in the wings, ready to provide a model, guide and authority to replace the obsolete Charter and establish the urgently needed "new UN," one that respects enforceable world law. 

-- R. Kotila, PhD