A dark turn in the Middle East
The American axis continues doing what it does best: killing people for corporate profit, while writers & editors spin the news to obscure human rights abuses enabled from Washington to Tel Aviv
This weekend’s escalation of violence in occupied Palestine continues a disturbing pattern, yet journalists across the west continue to mischaracterize the facts. From longstanding historical background to reporting on the most recent conflagration, the one thing most western news reports have in common is that they continue to spread disinformation favorable to Wall Street, the Pentagon, and their henchmen from Washington to Tel Aviv.
While offering yet another example, that pattern is sadly nothing new. The price, ultimately, is paid by innocent people—while weapons companies, American policymakers, and the government agencies that they insulate laugh all the way to the bank.
More Jews died this weekend than on any single day since the Holocaust.
Yet vastly—beyond an order of magnitude—more Palestinians have died over the course of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Lost in reporting about this weekend’s events is an accurate picture of the situation, the roots of the escalating conflict, and the U.S. interests that continue to drive unnecessary and preventable violence.
“Journalism” and disinformation
One after another, the repeated narrative that the coordinated Hamas incursion into Israel this weekend was an “unprovoked” example of “terrorism” appeared in media outlets across the United States. That characterization is demonstrably false, yet it plays a key role in enabling one conflict after another.
When U.S. government sources described Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine as “unprovoked,” western media parroted their claims and left them unchecked despite the Pentagon-backed Maidan coup in 2014 that set the stage for Putin’s invasion. The history from 2014 was not only crucial to place the 2022 invasion in context, but offered a very definition of provocation.
Similarly, writers & editors widely described the 9/11 attacks in 2001 as “unprovoked,” despite unapologetic American human rights abuses throughout the Global South for decades. One might think that the attacks happening on the precise anniversary of a CIA coup in Chile might have forced reporters to offer some context, but that presumption underestimates the ignorance of editors.
Provocation is the Pentagon’s stock & trade. Transparency could enable the public to make better decisions over how our military is used, but the two institutions responsible for ensuring it—Congress and the press—are both thoroughly co-opted.
In fact, Hamas’ incursion was far from unprovoked. The last 70 years have been one of continual provocation enabled not only by Israeli human rights abuses, but also crucial American support.
Gaza, in particular, has long been the world’s largest open-air prison. In an open letter to the U.N. Security Council, a coalition of Palestinian human rights groups noted this weekend that “Israel has carried out at least six massive military offensives since 2008, which have rendered the Gaza Strip uninhabitable. Between 2010 and 2019, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) recorded 3,624 Palestinians and 203 Israelis killed, and 103,207 Palestinians and 4,642 Israelis injured.”
Beyond the mounting casualties, more than 100,000 Gazans have been displaced since the latest fighting began this weekend.
Perhaps it should not surprise anyone that the term “unprovoked” appeared across U.S. media to describe a response to three generations of armed occupation and unrelenting human rights abuses. The same voices who continually demonstrate such charity towards Israel’s human rights abuses are the same ones that defer to those by Washington.
Unfortunately, ignoring Israel’s seemingly limitless provocations is just one among many examples of disinformation spread by American writers and editors.
A “religious” conflict rooted in resources
Growing up in the U.S., I thought for most of my life that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is, at root, a religious one. That is another example of disinformation to which the western press has long been committed.
This conflict is in no way religious. It has always been a conflict about resources—with an ecocidal dimension.
First, Jews and Muslims have no fundamental tension inherent in our belief systems. Islam relies on Jewish texts, and the Qur’an explicitly adopts their teachings. Jews and Muslims stood as allies for a millennium as various European powers compelled religious adherence from their subjects.
The tension that has emerged in the past century is rooted in geopolitics, British imperialism, and the human rights abuses that ensued after the Nakba in 1948.
Second, Christian Palestinians have suffered from Israeli occupation and human rights abuses to the same extent as Muslims. That’s much of why so many Palestinians in the U.S. are Christian—they were the ones that Israel allowed to leave.
When the Israeli “Defense” Force murdered a 24 year-old American student named Rachel Corrie in 2003, it wasn’t because of her faith. It was because her defense of human rights threatened to expose international crimes, to which Israel added by killing her—not to mention untold numbers of Palestinians killed in the 20 years since Ms. Corrie died trying to defend human rights for which our nation once fought a world war.
The most obvious demonstration of the economic roots of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is the Israeli practice of destroying olive trees on which Palestinians have relied for up to thousands of years. There is no religious reason to destroy thousand year-old trees—only economic & political ones.
The fact that Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians include the ecocidal destruction of priceless ancient food forests simply confirms what a close analysis of a map should reveal. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is (quite literally) rooted, ultimately, in water.
In any desert, water is priceless. In Palestine, it is also routinely stolen. The West Bank’s aquifers have been effectively seized by Israel, which officially uses 73% of their water, while allowing illegal Jewish settlers to use another 10%—leaving the West Bank’s Palestinians just 17%.
No religion counsels stealing your neighbors’ water.
“Asymmetric conflict” and disproportionality
Among the aspects of this weekend’s attack by Hamas that surprised observers around the world was its operational sophistication despite technological disadvantages. Yet, while Hamas claimed greater tactical success than any Palestinian response to the Israeli occupation since it began 75 years ago, it pales relative to the intensity and scale of the Israeli response.
Hamas insurgents have deliberately targeted civilians. They have launched rockets at Israeli settlements, killed victims—including at least nine Americans—by the dozens at a music festival, and taken hundreds of hostages.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military has also deliberately targeted civilians—but, unlike Hamas, it has done so en masse. The Israeli blockade of Gaza was already suffocating before Tel Aviv announced its escalation today into an outright siege, sealing off Gaza nearly entirely. Meanwhile, Israel has indiscriminately bombed apartment buildings, targeted ambulances, and even refugee camps.
It’s worth recalling that, for months earlier this year, Israel was rocked by unprecedented domestic dissent responding to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s attempt to erode its democracy and impose an increasingly authoritarian form of government—one disregarding not only the rights of Palestinians, but also those of Israelis.
Lurking in the corner, unnamed by seemingly every writer covering this weekend’s events, is the set of institutions from Langley to Wall Street that have handsomely profited from violence—and continue to do so to this day.
Filling Wall Street’s pockets
America’s disdain for democracy & human rights is neither new nor an object of history. The Pentagon and agencies including the CIA have been involved in dozens of coups to topple democracies around the world in the service of expanding Wall Street’s profits.
That pattern continues today.
The 2022 military coup in Niger continued the pattern, as did another constitutional coup in the same year in my native country. The State Department continues to lie about Washington’s efforts to remove a democratically elected leader in Islamabad because he refused to support America’s war for profit in Ukraine.
Pakistan is the country from which my parents fled due to religious discrimination 40 years ago. Like the instability that ensued across the region after they left, that discrimination was also fueled by the Pentagon, which backed a military dictator with a notorious hatred for people who share my faith.
The pattern of Pentagon intervention there, and around the rest of the world, particularly Latin America, is much of what prompted my campaigns for Congress to challenge a key enabler of American foreign-policy abuses.
I was grateful when some reporters highlighted my stance against militarism during my 2020 campaign. The concerns I raised then apply no less today than they did at the time.
Unfortunately, however, America has learned nothing from the pattern established (and repeatedly reinforced) over the last 75 years. Democrats appear to be especially proud of their ignorance: just last week, the Governor of California passed over a renowned advocate for peace who has represented Oakland in the House of Representatives for a generation, to instead embrace a figure with a troubling history and a disturbingly comfortable relationship with the corporate centrists who lead the Democratic Party.
On the one hand, some Republicans appear to have taken heed of the country’s longstanding stance opposing wars for profit. While that may seem like an encouraging sign, I don’t frankly trust any of them since their claim to oppose the Pentagon’s interests is ultimately both partisan and convenient. Most of them would start a war with China in a heartbeat, and limit their concerns to Ukraine when the entire project of what Americans call “defense” is irredeemably corrupt.
Ultimately, war is America’s most lucrative business.
Meanwhile, Members of Congress have been buying stocks of corporate weapons manufacturers, yet again presenting conflicts of interests that remain widely unreported despite their thorough documentation.
Neither surveillance nor weapons can ensure security
Many voices have described this weekend’s tragic events as an “intelligence failure,” while ultimately remaining charitable to Israel, its intelligence establishment, and the methods on which it relies.
Paid subscribers can access a preview of my next post. It will explore some implications of this weekend’s events for regarding civil liberties within the United States, and a debate in Washington that remains 25 years overdue.
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