Israel sells critical technology and supports state terrorists as well as criminals

Exporting the Technology of Occupation

Antony Loewenstein, NYR Daiy January 4, 2019

Over more than half a century of occupation, Israel has mastered the arts of monitoring and surveilling millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. Israel is now packaging and selling this knowledge to governments that admire the country’s ability to suppress and manage resistance. Israel’s occupation has thus gone global. The country’s defense exports reached a record $9.2 billion in 2017, 40 percent higher than in 2016 (in a global arms market that recorded its highest ever sales in 2017 at $398.2 billion).

Read more at the NYRB

Israel’s Mockery of Security: 

101 Actions Israel Could Take

by Sam Bahour, COUNTERPUNCH, November 14, 2018

In debating an Israeli friend from Jerusalem, I challenged him that Israel consciously plans and uses its military might to damage the Palestinian’s national project to build a state and free itself from Israeli control. Avner, my Israeli friend, argued otherwise, buying into the Israeli state narrative that Israel is “forced” to take measures which negatively affect Palestinians because Israeli security requires it. My knee-jerk reaction as someone living and working under Israeli military occupation for over two decades, was that this was hogwash and, short of ending its illegal (note: legal occupations are temporary by definition) occupation of Palestinians, I claimed that Israel—the occupying power—could immediately take 101 measures to reduce tensions on the ground, without jeopardizing any true and rational security needs. He shrugged and said, “tell me”?
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So, here it is. A quick compilation, with the generous assistance of several friends here in Palestine, and with a few items selected from the umpteen reports being published about the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs. This list is not intended to be comprehensive by any means, but rather a look beyond the daily headlines to give readers, especially those who have bought into the Israeli propaganda—hook, line and sinker—that this military occupation is all about “security”.
 

The silent guys, the Saudis

Cracks in the House of Saud

by Patrick Cockburn, COUNTERPUNCH, Oct. 9, 2018

Two paragraphs of this article by Cockburn should be reflected on:

It is early days yet but the Khashoggi disappearance has released a torrent of negative publicity about Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This was wholly predictable. It is a curious fact about publicity that horrendous events – like the Saudi-led war in Yemen that has brought five million children to the verge of starvation – has failed to make its way to the top of the international news agenda. The slaughter is too great and the place too distant and ill-reported for most people to take on board and react to the horrors underway there.

Something on a smaller scale, like the disappearance of a critic of the Saudi government while his fiance waits for him in the street, is much easier to understand and respond to. Often, the all-too-common disappearance of journalists has the simple objective of silencing them and intimidating others. “Let them hate us so long as they fear us,” is the point being crudely made.

We know this strange phenomenon from history. Genocides do not touch people, single murder lead to tears and outcries. 

The Jewish Apartheid State

The Apartheid State of Israel: Decoding the ‘Basic Law’ and the Meaning of a ‘Jewish Nation’

by N.D. Jayaprakash, August 8, 2018 COUNTERPUNCH

The latest ‘Basic Law’ that was enacted by the Israeli Knesset on July 19, 2018 has adverse effect on Palestinians within Israel and in the occupied territories of Palestine. It contravenes even the assertions made in the Declaration of Independence by the Provisional Government of Israel on May 14, 1948. The existence of at least 65 other laws that seek to discriminate Arab Palestinians vis-à-vis their Jewish counterparts provide proof of the existence of an Apartheid system in Israel, which is well captured in the ESCWA Report of 2017.

Donald, NATO and the upcoming wars

Counterpunch, July 11, 2018

NATO’s Crisis and the Trans-Atlantic Conflict

by Jan Oberg

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union dissolved and the Warsaw Pact disappeared, a few of us argued that the appropriate response would be to close down NATO and develop a new all-European peace system and a policy for conflict-handling to replace the predominantly military security thinking that had dominated during the First Cold War.

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Today the NATO member states met and surrender under Donald Trumps attacks. 2018 - 1968. What historic date and event is to remember? 1968 Breschnew kissed the Czecho-Slowakian Alexander Dubcek. Shortly afterwards the USSR and her allied Warsaw countries were to invade the CSSR and break down the unwanted politics of the Pargue Spring.

The danger of repetition, this time by the American warmonger Trump, isn't acute at the moment. But forms of war have changed. As the US will destroy Iran not primarily by bombs, as it did in Irak, the economic measures and the instrumentalisations of some oppositional groups will bring the desired results. The goal is – war.

The political pressure put on Germany, especially concerning the direct pipeline from Russia to Germany, will weaken not only Germany but Europe. Trump and his hawks are clearly war oriented. Europe is divided and weak, has no will and vision and gives in. The European Union behaves like the dog who is listening (and obeying) to his master's voice.

Most mass media support the American vision and continue to fabricate fake news and falsifications of historical facts. The goal is – war.

Chomsky & Barsamian on Trump & Co

October 3, 2017
Tomgram: Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, A World in Peril

I first “met” Noam Chomsky in 1969 by reading these words of his about the My Lai massacre:

“And now there is Song My -- ‘Pinkville.’ More than two decades of indoctrination and counterrevolutionary interventions have created the possibility of a name like ‘Pinkville’ -- and the acts that may be done in a place so named. Orville and Jonathan Schell have pointed out what any literate person should realize, that this was no isolated atrocity but the logical consequence of a virtual war of extermination directed against helpless peasants: ‘enemies,’ ‘reds,’ ‘dinks.’”

Discussing various of America’s criminal acts in the larger war in Vietnam, Chomsky then added of the My Lai massacre itself:

“It is perhaps remarkable that none of this appears to occasion much concern. It is only the acts of a company of half-crazed GIs that are regarded as a scandal, a disgrace to America. It will, indeed, be a still greater national scandal -- if we assume that to be possible -- if they alone are subjected to criminal prosecution, but not those who have created and accepted the long-term atrocity to which they contributed one detail -- merely a few hundred more murdered Vietnamese.”

Chomsky wrote “After Pinkville” -- areas like Song My were then colored pink on American military maps -- in 1969. Almost half a century later, the question is: Have things improved? After all, in Ken Burns’s new Vietnam extravaganza, his 18-hour documentary on that war, he seems to have captured the zeitgeist of the moment by carefully changing the word “murder” in the script for the My Lai episode to “killing.” “At lunch, Burns defended his change," wrote the New Yorker’s Ian Parker,"on the ground that My Lai continues to have ‘a toxic, radioactive effect’ on opinion. ‘Killing’ was the better word, he said, ‘even though My Lai is murder.’” To be thoroughly upbeat, perhaps by 2067 Americans will finally be able to take “murder” straight on television when it comes to My Lai.

Almost 50 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg was both celebrated by many and unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Nixon administration, in part under the Espionage Act, for releasing The Pentagon Papers, a massive secret trove of documents that revealed to the American people something of what the United States was actually doing in Vietnam. In our era, Chelsea Manning did something similar. She turned over a twenty-first-century trove of secret documents on the Afghan and Iraq wars -- on, that is, what she’s accurately termed “death, destruction, and mayhem” -- to WikiLeaks and for that she was celebrated by few and prosecuted and convicted by the U.S. military.  Pardoned by President Obama after seven years in military prison, she recently had her visiting fellowship to Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government rescinded after CIA Director Mike Pompeo cancelled a talk there, complaining that Manning had “betrayed her country,” and former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, a senior fellow at the same school, resigned in protest. Or to put it another way, Harvard caved to men who represented an agency that had committed secret acts of horror betraying every imaginable American value. (To give credit where it’s due, significant numbers of Harvard faculty members protested this craven act.) The same institute felt no compunctions about offering a visiting fellowship to former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer and, despite alumni protest, not rescinding it. Perhaps there’s an essay, “After Punkville,” to be written about all of this.

Under the circumstances, it’s our good fortune that, with civilians regularly being “killed” by U.S. firepower across the Greater Middle East, Noam Chomsky continues to remind us what our world really looks like if we don’t censor either our language or our thoughts. It makes today’s TomDispatch post, a recent interview from his upcoming book with David Barsamian, Global Discontents: Conversations on the Rising Threats to Democracy, particularly relevant to our moment. Tom

The Trump Presidency
Or How to Further Enrich “The Masters of the Universe”
By Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian

Read on here

Militarizing Homeland Security

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The New Face of "War" at Home

The United States just experienced its largest rainfall event in memory. For the first time in recorded weather history, two category 4 hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit in a single season (not yet over). And San Francisco, famed for its chilliness, experienced an unheard of 106 degree day as September began, while a record West Coast heat wave, essentially an unending Irma or Harvey of wildfires, left parts of the region, from Los Angeles to British Columbia, enwreathed in a pall of smoke and ash (without even an El Niño year to blame for it). And did I mention that both states hit by those recent hurricanes have climate-change denying governors? Or that the man now in charge in Washington also denies the reality of climate change (a Chinese hoax!) and has stocked his administration with a remarkable cast of fervent deniers (the latest such appointment being the head of NASA), who have essentially wiped all references to the phenomenon off every imaginable federal website, fired climate-change scientists, and -- as a crew regularly backed in their careers by big energy -- seem intent on recreating the fossil-fueled America of The Donald’s 1950s childhood.



Beyond Harvey and Irma
Militarizing Homeland Security in the Climate-Change Era
By Michael T. Klare, Sept. 17, 2017

Read on at TomDispatch

North Korea and war

A Murderous History of Korea

Bruce Cumings

More than four decades ago I went to lunch with a diplomatic historian who, like me, was going through Korea-related documents at the National Archives in Washington. He happened to remark that he sometimes wondered whether the Korean Demilitarised Zone might be ground zero for the end of the world. This April, Kim In-ryong, a North Korean diplomat at the UN, warned of ‘a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment’. A few days later, President Trump told Reuters that ‘we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea.’ American atmospheric scientists have shown that even a relatively contained nuclear war would throw up enough soot and debris to threaten the global population:

Read on at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

History: The General v. the President

The Greatest Person then Living

Andrew Bacevich

• BuyThe General v. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War by H.W. Brands
  Anchor, 438 pp, £21.00, November 2016, ISBN 978 0 385 54057 5

H.W. Brands is a well-known and prolific historian of an old-fashioned sort. With no axe to grind and no agenda to advance, he is all about telling stories, which he does exceedingly well. In The General v. the President he recounts a remarkable episode in American history: the clash between President Harry S. Truman and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur that culminated with MacArthur being sacked in April 1951.

Read more at the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Trump seeks war with Iran and some other devil enemies

All Signs Point to Trump’s Coming War With Iran

by John Feffer, COUNTERPUNCH, June 23, 2017

The Saudi war in Yemen is really directed at…Iran. Donald Trump’s first overseas visit to Saudi Arabia and Israel was specifically targeted at…Iran. The Saudi-led isolation of Qatar is actually about…Iran.
The escalation of U.S. military actions against the Syria government is… well, do I really need to spell this out any further?