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Aguilar's comments were shared by Elizabeth Berry on Facebook
Below are former US Green Beret, Anthony Aguilar's comments on Democracy Now describing US genocide in action. There are thousands of Americans that are complicit as IDF soldiers or simply supporters. The US government, or as Michael Beckley writing in Foreign Affairs Magazine refers to it, the"Rogue superpower" , is behind the genocide. The most vitriol is directed at the Israeli neo-Nazi regime which is justified but it is important to point out that this human catastrophe is Washington's project. Biden could have stopped the mass murder a long time ago. The tail does not wag the horse in this situation as some people are arguing.
This situation in Gaza is not uncommon at all for US military ventures. Let us not forget Fallujah which will be a shrine forever for the Iraqi resistance to an illegal war waged on them by the US. The assault on Fallujah was punishment for the population taking revenge on US mercenaries they managed to get their hands on.The most prolific terrorist organization in the world is the CIA and its parent, US imperialism. A Aguilar reveals the hypocrisy and brutality of the phone US/Israel aid centre let's not forget the US dock built that last a month or so at a cost of around $500 million. I have a popular footbridge over the creek in my ton damaged by storm felled trees and we can't get that fixed.
Here are Aguilars's comments.
Richard Mellor
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"What I witnessed in Gaza, I can only describe as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wasteland. We — we, the United States — are complicit. We are involved, hand in hand, in the atrocities and the genocide that is currently undergoing in Gaza. For anyone who says that there is no starvation or mass hunger, or that not only are we at the precipice, but we have stepped over the line of wide-scale famine, to anyone who says that that’s not happening, shame on you. Shame on you. It’s inhumane.
What I witnessed in Gaza at all four distribution sites — I didn’t just go to one for a photo-op. I didn’t go to one to watch a distribution and then say, “Yes, this looks great.” I spent days on end in Gaza at all four distribution sites, at Kerem Shalom, where the aid is loaded for distribution, and at both operation centers that control the daily convoys, logistics operations and distribution for the four sites. What I saw on the sites, around the sites, to and from the sites, can be described as nothing but war crimes, crimes against humanity, violations of international law. This is not hyperbole. This is not platitudes or drama. This is the truth."
RAZOR WIRE WAS USED AT THESE SITES
The sites, not only where they were built, all four sites around the perimeter and the roads leading in and out are barricaded by razor wire — not barbed wire, not concertina wire that we use in warfare for obstacle obstruction or for paths. Razor wire. Geneva Conventions specifically prohibit the use of razor wire to restrict areas that civilians are servicing — hospitals, water points, food distribution points. And we’re using it. Not only did the IDF provide it for us to use it on the sites, we, UG Solutions, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, asked for it specifically. Razor wire is designed to maim and kill, and we’re using that to channelize and herd, if you will, thousands of unarmed, starving civilians. That’s a war crime.
GHF EMPLOYEES WERE GIVEN AUTOMATIC WEAPONS TO DEFEND THEMSELVES AGAINST STARVING CIVILIANS The equipment, the equipment that we were issued, fully automatic weapons, which, in and of itself, is not a violation of protocol. However, we were issued M855 green-tipped ammunition. That’s important, because green-tipped ammunition is a steel-jacketed copper round that’s designed to — specifically designed to penetrate armor. It’s designed to kill. It’s designed to shoot through reinforced objects, to kill someone on the other side of it. That’s what all the UG Solutions contractors are equipped with right now in country. Everyone carries a standard basic load of 210 rounds of M855 armor-piercing military combat ammunition. Why would anyone need that, even if to defend themselves for their — defend their lives, against an unarmed population? It’s inappropriate. That, in and of itself, that action there, is a war crime.
SITE WERE DESIGNED TO LURE AND KILL, NOT TO MEET THE NEEDS OF A STARVING POPULATION.
The sites were designed to lure, bait, aid and kill. The food that we distribute, nowhere near enough. To Mr. Johnnie Moore, shame on you for celebrating 92 million meals delivered into Gaza. Shame on you. It’s a very simple equation: 92 divided by 2.2 million people, divided by 3 million — or, three meals a day. That’s what GHF proclaims. We’ve been distributing aid since the 26th of May, 26th May to now the 29th of June, 64 days of continuous distribution, and we’ve only managed to distribute 92 million meals. When you break that down, again, it’s a simple equation. That’s 14 days of meals. So, out of 64 days, we’ve provided 14 days of meals to the entire population in the enclave of Gaza. That’s inhumane. That would be like saying that you only eat every fourth day — you only eat on Thursday, and you only eat on Monday. And to say that that’s humanitarian? So, to anyone that says that that’s enough or — not even close to enough. The narrative of GHF needs help to do the rest, you don’t need help, because you’re not even anywhere close to where we need to be.
Readers are probably aware that former UK Labor Party members, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultan, MP for Coventry have launched a new political party to the left of the British Labor Party. As of this point half a million members have signed up. Below is an opinion on this formation reprinted from the Workers'International Network based in London. RM
In 24 hours 300k people sign up to “ Your Party” in an unprecedented show of enthusiasm. This is all the more remarkable in that no one yet knows exactly what they are signing up for, even if it is to be a party or a series of umbrellas. For now all that anyone knows for sure is that it will be different and it will aim for change. So hated are the current politicians and the social status quo, difference and change are more than enough to generate widespread enthusiasm.
A year ago the electorate voted for change. We got change all right but change for the worse. Instead of low decimal point economic growth we got economic contraction. Instead of taxing the rich we got cuts to disabled peoples assistance. Gandhi was changed for Carlos the Jackal as peace campaigners are now labelled terrorists. International humanitarian aid money now buys weapons for the armed forces. Woke free speech restrictions mean that genocide can’t be called out in case it hurts the feelings of the murderers. Wages and incomes stall while prices and bills accelerate. I could go on in that vein all day and not even begin to exhaust the reasons for people to be angry at the current situation. So too could virtually every person in this country with the exception of those people who are doing rather well out of it, the mega rich and their well paid enablers, the politicians and the media.
Sultana and Corbyn are both advocates of the kind of change people actually want. Secure jobs that pay a living wage not zero hour contracts, public services and utilities that work for people not just for shareholder profit and a foreign policy based on peace not warfare. That is why so many joined so fast, this time with this initiative they hope to get the change that they want and need. Their aim is to fix the crises in our society with a mass redistribution of wealth and power.
A vocal few have taken issue with the time this initiative has taken and the secretive back room nature of a lot of what has preceded this current sign up drive. While we sympathise with many of the criticisms they have made we have to point out that these matters were out of our hands, none of us could have issued a call and have hundreds of thousands respond. Now we have to play the cards we have been dealt the best way we can. If there really is a secretive group hiding in the shadows that believes it can manipulate this new party by pulling the strings of the members then it are in for a rude shock, Momentum can not be resurrected, large swathes of this new party have been through the school of the labour party and graduated with honours. It is in these members that we place our trust.
On the other hand, some individuals were rushing forward with their grand master organisational schemes to be adopted right down to the fine details before the website clicker had even reached triple digits. For Marxists though while the nature of an organisational structure is important it is political ideas, method and approach that will be decisive in this new party. So what should Marxists advocate to help this new party develop into a real alternative to the Tories and the other capitalist parties ?
The Forde report noted in a shocked tone that the Labour Party administration did not act like impartial civil servants. The reason for that lack of impartiality is clear to every former Labour Party member. It is because the party administration was itself the core of the right wing faction that waged war on the members and saw them as the enemies (Trots). The administration did everything they could to destabilise the elected leader of the party, Corbyn, hamstring the lay party members and to prevent the selection or election of any further left wing MPs, even going so far as sabotaging election campaigns .
To prevent the situation that led to the defeat of the left in the Labour Party reoccurring in the new party, that of an administration usurping the authority of the party membership, it is necessary to devise a democratic structure based on one member one vote. Where all officials and representatives are elected by the body they represent and to whom they must be responsible and report back to. They must be subject to recall and none of them receive more than the average pay of a skilled worker (£38k per annum) so that none are attracted to the administration for well paid careerist reasons.
The only real guarantee against the new party, its administration, its councillors or MPs or its leaders getting out of the control of its members is a confident politically educated membership. Political education and campaigning should be at the core of the new party.
Perspectives for the economic and political development of society should be drawn up and discussed and debated at regular intervals. That way the party or its members will not be taken by surprise by events or blown off course. They will have a map that shows where they are and the route to get where they are going.
In order to deliver the change that so many desire and deserve, a mass redistribution of wealth and power. It is necessary to devise a programme that meets the needs of the working class. The 10 pledges need to be resurrected and the manifesto of 2019 needs to be revived and updated as a first step in that direction.
While the leadership of the Labour Party has succumbed to a mutated version of the neoliberalist virus that infected their predecessors from 1997 onwards the party is far from dead yet. Even among the right wing administration’s hand picked MPs there is rebellion only a year into office. As Johnson found, winning a landslide victory is not enough to ensure loyal obedience from the backbenchers or the ministers and Starmer is now if anything in a more precarious situation than was Johnson, who was at least popular with the rank and file of his party.
While Starmer was easily able to proscribe Marxist groups in the party, he was also able to expel socialists by the score. What he can not do is prevent the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and he can not prevent the class struggle being reflected in the Labour Party. Only a few years after a strike wave the trade unions ranks are stirring and NEC elections that were once formalities are now hotly contested between left and right and the beginnings of attempts to transform the unions by the ranks are either underway or are being reflected in the maneuvers of the bureaucrats.
Many in the ranks of labour and the trade unions will be watching the development of the new party with rapt attention, not just deciding if they should join the new party but in the days to come, they will also ask themselves whether they could replicate the new party’s policies in their own organisation. In this way the new party can influence labour and the trade unions for good but only if it is not sectarian. The new party must face towards the labour party and the trade unions in a positive way, criticising their failings but encouraging them to move away from neoliberalism
Marxist are not some quack theorists, we are attempting to express the actual relations that arise from the real existing class struggle. We point out the real common interests of every worker on this planet, not a day goes by when those common interests get closer and not a day goes by without that common interest becoming more apparent to every worker on this planet. Just as workers in Maidenhead and Middlesbrough have the same interests, so too do the workers of Macau, Mombasa, Milwaukee and Mumbai who face the same bosses, the same problems and the same solutions . Only on the basis of socialist internationalism will a party that represents the whole working class be built.
A new ‘dossier’ reveals extensive pro-Israel bias among reporters, editors and executives at the ‘NYTimes’
New York Times reporters are supposed to follow a strict code of ethics to avoid even the appearance of bias. A new report shows how the paper ignores this when it comes to covering Palestine.
WRITERS AGAINST THE WAR ON GAZA PROTEST IN THE NEW YORK TIMES’ HEADQUARTERS, MARCH 14, 2024. (PHOTO: JULIA SHARPE-LEVINE)
Normally, New York Times journalists work under a strict code of behavior meant to reduce the appearance of bias in their reports. They are not, for instance, allowed to attend political rallies or demonstrations in their personal capacity. One Timesreporter told me years ago that she couldn’t go to a pro-abortion rights march, even though she didn’t cover the issue. These restrictions extend into the Internet Age. Times journalists on social media are supposed to be guarded in their opinions, and they can be cautioned if they overstep.
But the Times’s struggle against even the appearance of bias vanishes when the subject is Israel and the Palestinians. The organization called Writers Against the War on Gaza recently released a “dossier” which listed “high-ranking editors, journalists and executive officers at the Times” who the group alleges have “material and ideological ties to occupation and apartheid.”
Most obvious are Times reporters who have personal or family connections to Israel’s military. The dossier cites Natan Odenheimer, who actually served in the army’s “Maglan” special forces commando unit for almost 4 years. Interestingly, Odenheimer’s own summary of his experience on the Times website completely leaves out this portion of his biography. He tells us: “I’ve reported on Israelis and Palestinians for over a decade, and my work has also taken me to Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and other locations.” But somehow his military experience didn’t make the cut.
Reporter Isabel Kershner’s two sons served in Israel’s military. And in the past, Ethan Bronner’s son was also a soldier. The dossier notes that Bill Keller, then the Times’s executive editor, actually defended that connection, arguing that Bronner’s reporting benefited, because his son’s service “suppl[ied] a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack.” (For the record, this site has over the years been on top of this story. Here’s the Kershner connection, from more than a decade ago. And Phil Weiss explained how Bronner went to great lengths to try and conceal the link.)
Let’s pause for a thought experiment. Let’s say the Times considered hiring a Palestinian reporter in Jerusalem — who it then turned out had belonged to a militant group in his or her youth. The ensuing firestorm of criticism would instantly sink the appointment.
The dossier also cites Times opinion writers who have strong pro-Israel views, including columnists Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, and David Brooks. Here, in fairness, the paper is on firmer ground, because editorial writers, unlike reporters, are allowed, in fact encouraged, to have opinions. That said, you certainly won’t find anything approaching balance — which would be (at least) three columnists with pro-Palestinian backgrounds and views who regularly appear on the paper’s editorial page.
The dossier also cites people in Times management to raise still more legitimate questions of bias. One key example is Meredith Kopit Levien, who was on the advisory board of the pro-Zionist organization B’nai B’rith when she was picked as the paper’s CEO in 2020. In fairness, Levien is also not an actual reporter, and she doesn’t have to meet the same exacting standards. However: another thought experiment. Let’s say the Times found a talented candidate for a senior management post who was part of a group that advocated on behalf of another foreign government with a long list of human rights abuses. Would he or she get the job?
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The Magnificent 7 stocks — NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Meta, Tesla and Amazon — now make up around 35% of the value of the US stock market, and NVIDIA’s market value makes up about 19% of the Magnificent 7. The S&P 500 has never been more concentrated in a single stock than it is today, with Nvidia representing close to 8% of the index.
This is a hugely top heavy stock market, now at record levels, driven by just seven stocks and in particular, Nvidia, the company that is making all the processors needed by AI companies to develop their models. If Nvidia’s revenue growth should weaken, that will put huge downward pressure on this highly overvalued stock market. As Torsten Slok, chief economist at one of the largest investment institutions, put it: “The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.”
So is the great AI sector a huge bubble, funded by fictitious capital that will not be realised by revenues and, more important, profits for the AI leaders? By the end of this year, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Tesla will have spent over $560 billion in capital expenditures on AI in the last two years, but they have only accrued revenues of about $35 billion. Amazon plans to spend $105 billion in capital expenditures this year but will get revenues of just $5bn. And revenues are not profit, as revenues are measured before the costs of delivering AI services. Investment in AI is now at $332 billion of capital expenditures in 2025 for just $28.7 billion of revenue. Investment in the huge data centers necessary to train and source AI models is planned to reach $1trn by the end of the decade.
But if any of the Magnificent Seven start getting cold feet on what they are spending relative to revenues and profit and so reduce their purchases of chips, Nvidia’s stock price could head downwards fast, taking others with it.
Are the expected returns of revenue on this massive capital investment likely to materialise? Goldman Sachs’ head of equity research, Jim Covello, questioned whether the companies planning to pour $1tn into building generative AI would ever see a return on the money. A partner at venture capital firm Sequoia, meanwhile, estimated that tech companies needed to generate $600bn in extra revenue to justify their extra capital spending in 2024 alone — around six times more than they were likely to produce.
Take the well known ChatGPT. It has, allegedly, 500 million weekly active users — but by the last count, only 15.5 million paying subscribers, just a 3% conversion rate. While increasing numbers of people now use AI chatbots, only a tiny number are paying for the AI service they use, producing annual revenue of about $12bn, according to a survey of 5,000 American adults by Menlo Ventures.
When it comes to profits from AI, the situation is even worse. Big Tech’s annual earnings growth results have been flat or slowing for the past few quarters and are expected to slow further in 2025 and 2026.
So huge investment of money and resources, astronomic payments to AI trainers, and massive data centers being constructed – with the AI hype driving the stock market to ever new heights – but so far, with no significant revenues raised and virtually no profits. This is a repeat of the dot.com bubble on steroids.
However, a bubble there may be, but that does not mean that eventually a new ‘disrupting’ technology will not emerge that will radically change the productivity frontier for the major economies and thus deliver a new period of growth. The dot.com bubble burst in 2000 with a massive drop in the stock market, but the internet went on to spread into all sectors of business and into all households – and the Magnificent Seven emerged.
Take another example from the 19th century. During the 1840s, there was Railway Mania, as huge numbers of companies raised funds to invest in constructing rail lines across Britain. Railway shares rocketed, with stock prices doubling in 18 months from early 1843. But after the bubble came the burst in 1845, with many companies going bust and stock prices falling by half. This triggered a widespread financial crisis and a slump in production. Nevertheless, the railways were built, transport costs dropped sharply and consumer demand for travel expanded mightily. Britain entered an economic boom in the 1850s.
Will the AI bubble follow the same path, producing a financial collapse and crisis, but eventually provide the basis for new growth in productivity? In previous posts on AI, I have recounted the scepticism about the productivity benefits of AI offered by such experts as Nobel prize winner, Daren Acemoglu and others. Also in a recent in-depth report by the OECD on productivity growth in the major economies, cold water was poured onto impact of the internet in raising productivity growth in the last 25 years.
As the OECD report put it: “Over the past half-century we have filled offices and pockets with ever-faster computers, yet labour-productivity growth in advanced economies has slowed from roughly 2 per cent a year in the 1990s to about 0.8 per cent in the past decade. Even China’s once-soaring output per worker has stalled”. Research productivity has sagged. The average scientist now produces fewer breakthrough ideas per dollar than their 1960s counterpart.
Labour productivity growth has been on a declining trend since the 1970s across the OECD and weakened further since the turn of the century. In the US, productivity picked up from the mid 1990s to the mid-2000s on the back of rising efficiency in the production of ICT equipment and the diffusion of internet-related innovations that were adopted in ICT-using sectors, notably retail. “However, this rebound was relatively short-lived and productivity growth has since then been lacklustre.”
The key factor in raising productivity of labour is investment in new labour-saving technology. But business investment has slowed markedly in all countries. And the OECD makes clear why. The “investment slowdown despite readily available and cheap credit for firms with access to capital markets is in line with historical patterns showing that uncertainty and expected profits tend to play a greater role than financial conditions in investment decisions.” In other words, the profitability of capital declined, reducing the incentive to invest in new technologies.
And so-called ‘intangibles’, like software investment, did not compensate for the decline in investment in plant, equipment etc. “Notwithstanding the rise of intangibles, total investment since the GFC has been weak overall, which worsened the labour productivity slowdown directly.”
Will AI be different? Can it deliver higher productiivity through companies replacing millions of workers across the econmy with AI tools? The problem here is that economic miracles usually stem from discovery, not repeating tasks at greater speed. So far, AI primarily boosts efficiency rather than creativity. A survey of over 7,000 knowledge workers found heavy users of generative AI reduced weekly email tasks by 3.6 hours (31 per cent), while collaborative work remained unchanged. But once everyone delegated email responses to ChatGPT, inbox volume expanded, nullifying initial efficiency gains. “America’s brief productivity resurgence of the 1990s teaches us that gains from new tools, be they spreadsheets or AI agents, fade unless accompanied by breakthrough innovations.” (OECD).
Large language models gravitate towards the statistical consensus. A model trained before Galileo would have parroted a geocentric universe; fed 19th-century texts, it would have proved human flight impossible before the Wright brothers succeeded. A recent Nature review found that, while LLMs lightened routine scientific chores, the decisive leaps of insight still belonged to humans. Human cognition is better conceptualized as a form of theory-based causal reasoning rather than AI’s emphasis on information processing and data-based prediction. AI uses a probability-based approach to knowledge and is largely backward-looking and imitative, whereas human cognition is forward-looking and capable of generating genuine novelty.
The great Holy Grail of OpenAI and other AI companies is a super-intelligent generative AI that can take over innovation from humans. So far, that remains as mythical as the Holy Grail was in literature. Current GenAI can make only incremental discoveries, but cannot achieve fundamental discoveries from scratch as humans can.
But OpenAI guru, Sam Altman promises that its AI won’t just be able to do a single worker’s job, it will be able to do all of their jobs: “AI can do the work of an organization.” This would be the ultimate in maximising profitability by doing away with workers in companies (even AI companies?) as AI machines take over operating, developing and marketing everything. That’s why Altman and the other AI moguls will not stop expanding their data centres and developing yet more advanced chips, just because Chinese AI models like DeepSeek have undercut their current models. Nothing must stop the objective of super-intelligent AI.
Unfortunately, as MIT Tech explains, many AI models are notorious black boxes, which means that while an algorithm might produce a useful output, it’s unclear to researchers how it actually got there. This has been the case for years, with AI systems often defying statistics-based theoretical models. In other words, AI trainers don’t really know how AI models work. That is a major obstacle to achieving the Holy Grail.
So the AI boom is still just a financial bubble. As one commentator put it: “Generative AI does not do the things that it’s being sold as doing, and the things it can actually do aren’t the kind of things that create business returns, automate labor, or really do much more than one extension of a cloud software platform. The money isn’t there, the users aren’t there, every company seems to lose money and some companies lose so much money that it’s impossible to tell how they’ll survive.”
Meanwhile, the massive construction of data centers is consuming unprecedented levels of energy. The International Energy Agency predicts data centre electricity consumption will double to 945 terawatt-hours by 2030 — more than the current power used by an entire country such as Japan. Ireland and the Netherlands have already restricted the development of new data centres due to concerns about their impact on the electricity network. There are huge surges in power demand at data centres in training AI models, along with a bumpy renewable energy supply that threatens the resilience and capacity of current energy systems.
As for the productivity and growth outcomes, the OECD hedges its bets. If AI technologies spread and are successively implemented, the OECD reckons global labour productivity will rise by 2.4% pts over the next ten years, and add 4% to world GDP from where it would have been on current trends. However, if AI is not so successful in reducing the need for human labour and does not spread to all sectors, then labour productivity may rise only 0.8% pts above the current trend level in ten years (from the current 0.8% a year) and world economic growth will be unchanged. The jury is out.
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 7-25-25
The evidence is so compelling, that the up to now staunch pro-Zionist BBC is forced to change its tune somewhat. This has come about due to the courage and heroism of the Gazan's themselves and the Palestinian journalists inside Gaza. Without social media, this crime against humanity funded and backed by the US Congress, the UK, and other western countries would have been kept from the public eye. The latest denial of the crime by the US representative at the UN, a woman named Dorothy Shea,* continues this vile cover up as she blamed Hamas for stealing food and rejecting a cease fire. This blatant lie despite knowing that a US government investigation found no evidence of Hamas stealing food.
The present US president, the sexual deviant and convicted felon Donald Trump should face a Nuremberg moment, as should Biden and other US presidents but these two having invited the indicted war criminal Netanyahu to speak to the US Congress where he received a hero's welcome. should be first. Biden, who without a thought for the consequences faced by the residents of Gaza, sent more and more weapons of mass destruction to the perpetrators of the genocide and embraced the killer Netanyahu referring to him as a friend and proudly announcing to the world that he was a Zionist.
Hearing statements now from war criminals of a lesser rank like the pathetic representative of a human being like the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer who said the images from Gaza are "horrifying" should be condemned as the hypocrisy they are. He too should be in the dock.
Unfortunately the powerful rarely receive the pleasure of the hangman's noose as they are the judges, and the executioners in society. There is no such thing as a workers' tribunal, a workers' court of justice, yet anyway, as this is the only way true justice can be brought to bear on the real criminals in this world. At the height of the Russian revolution the Russian peasants, exploited for centuries by the Tsarist clique were finally able to settle accounts with their exploiters and hopefully that day will come for the workers of the world will settle accounts with those whose rapacious quest for profits threaten the existence of human civilisation on the planet and the destruction of the natural world that has nurtured it up to now.
Thank you to our Palestinian comrades, brothers and sisters, and their children whose sacrifices have not been for nought. You have changed the world and the workers of the world will never forget this.
And let's never forget who our real enemies are.
* An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to the name of the US representative as Kavanagh
During a rally of thousands demanding a hostage deal and ceasefire last August in Tel Aviv, a protestor holds up a placard with Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir strangling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a yellow ribbon that says: ‘Senior political figures.’ / Photo by Matan Golan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
On Tuesday a formal plan for the future of Gaza—as seen by the religious right—was presented to a diverse group of Israeli legislators, rabbis, grieving family members of IDF soldiers lost in combat or in Hamas captivity, and security officials from Gaza. The plan—in English its title is “The Riviera in Gaza—From Vision to Reality”—is a blueprint for a future in Gaza without the Palestinians who now are living and dying there. The meeting was held in the unpretentious second floor Negev Hall in the Knesset in Jerusalem.
At least two journalists from online news organizations that cover the religious right in Israel were invited to attend and publish what they wished. The meeting was headlined by two of Israel’s most outspoken and controversial advocates for the settlement of Israeli citizens in Gaza: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a West Bank settler who has a long history of violent anti-Arab agitation and at least eight convictions for violent anti-Arab activities.
Smotrich told the conference that Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the new Israeli military chief of staff, assured him in a recent conversation that the northern border of Gaza should be annexed “for security purposes.” Early in his career Zamir served as the military aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He is considered by many on the religious right to be an opportunist, although an increasingly welcome one.
I don’t follow the hard-line media in Israel, but I’ve been told by a highly decorated former IDF officer that he was stunned to learn that the religious far right in Israel would discuss the future of Gaza in specific detail with reporters present in the Knesset. One of the reporters wrote the following summary of what is to come Bahadrei Hadarim, a daily online news site serving the ultra-Orthodox, as translated from the Hebrew:
“The plan presented an unprecedented transformation [that would] return . . . Gaza to full Israeli sovereignty and transform it into a developed and innovative area, including housing for hundreds of thousands of residents, alongside advanced agriculture, a port, airports, industrial zones, universities, health funds and tourist complexes along the coast.
“The plans are based, among other things, on the destruction of the current Gaza Strip following the [ongoing war] with the Israel Defense Forces and present it as a starting point for rebuilding the entire area, on the model of a ‘political restart.’ The plan describes a redivision of the Strip into civilian governorates (such as the Rafah Governorate, the Khan Younis Governorate, and the Gaza Coast Governorate), with the establishment of infrastructural and regional anchors that will change the face of the entire southern Strip.
“The main features of the plan are the construction of approximately 850,000 housing units, an international airport, subways, metro lines, solar roads, autonomous drones, and a new seaport that will connect the Gaza Strip to the mainland axis of India and Europe and turn it into a global trade gateway.
“In addition, there will be few trade zones in the stock exchange, cryptocurrency, fintech, as well as the establishment of conference centers and high tech complexes. There also will be advanced agriculture in the south of the Strip with research parks, water purification, and energy storage, and an artificial island will be built off the coast of Gaza constructed from . . . war debris which will be used for trade and tourism.
“The plan will be implemented over fifteen years, in collaboration with Israel and international bodies. In the short term, the rubble [now throughout Gaza] will be cleared and infrastructure work will begin. In the following four years, transportation, neighborhoods and central complexes will be built, and in the long term, the trade zones, the artificial island, and the new settlements will be completed.”
According to the report, Smotrich added: “We have great support from the president of the United States to turn Gaza into a prosperous region, into a coastal city where there is settlement and employment. This is how peace is made.”
There were many similar speeches at the event, according to the report, with no discussion of what to do with the surviving Gazans, many of them suffering from malnutrition, ill health, and wounds from the bombs and guns of Israel.
The fantasy talk at the Knesset renewed concern Israelis I know about the rationality of the religious right in Israel, who are an essential part of Netanyahu’s political coalition. He is continuing to bomb Gaza and Israel’s neighbors—Iran last month and now Syria—and is being kept in office by US military aid and a religious right indifferent to the immense suffering in Gaza. Throughout the conference there was no talk of the horrid plight of the Gazans, many of whom are suffering from what can only called imminent starvation. It is an indifference to an ancient culture shared by many supporters of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
The online reports about the religious right’s vision of a glittering Gaza to come reminded one of my Israeli contacts, a secular Jew, of a failed 1939 Nazi plan to deport Jews, as war spread in occupied Poland. The goal of the Nisko Plan, as it was called, was to rid Western Europe of Jews and put them to work in German defense plants near Lublin, an area that was believed by some Nazis as a center of Jewish worldwide power and Jewish genetic potential. The area, close to the Ukraine border, was known to be “swampy.” The suffering of those in the overcrowded camps led to negative reporting and the fear that the Nazis would suffer from the adverse press.
There also were many many more Jews being deported from Poland than initially anticipated. Inevitably, as the Nazi offensive spread, the problem of overcrowding at Lublin and similar workcamps became unmanageable. The solution the Nazis enacted was the Holocaust and the mass murder of Jews.
For some Israelis, the casual talk at the Knesset meeting of expelling hundreds of thousands of Gazans and building a magical new city-state is, as I was told, “a monstrosity” that evokes the worst of World War II.
I was talking with someone the other day who pretty quick quickly ended the conversation when I raised a few points about the mass murder and genocide in Gaza. They stopped watching the news, or avoided social media which is the main source for what’s happening in Gaza. The scenes of shredded children or starving people, many of them children had become too much for them.
I couldn’t agree more, I find it difficult as well. Mind you, I don’t watch the mains stream media, if we want to know the depths of the depravity in Gaza, or anywhere else if that matters, we need to seek out social media. Without social media, the Zionist, Israeli, Western cover up of their genocide in Palestine would be extensive.
I understand these sentiments and also feel very much the same when people tell me there’s nothing they can do about it; they feel helpless so they avoid it, shut it out.
I get this. But there is something you can do. If you do nothing else, you can increase your knowledge of events, watch this video and share it widely. Share it with friends on your FB page, on Instagram and other outlets. Point it out to friends over a pint or at lunch. Raise it in your union and pass resolutions or letters opposing it and share them widely. You don’t have to live and die for this but you don’t have to stand on the side lines.
I am not making this appeal in order to guilt trip people in to activity or present an image of myself as more concerned about human suffering than others. I am not in the streets. But we are witnessing a Nazi like extermination of people in Gaza and the one force that could stop it (barring the conscious intervention of the working class in the US and internationally) is the US government. Unfortunately, the US rogue state is behind it all the way and has spent billions of our taxpayer dollars funding it. The western governments in general are complicit in this 21st century Palestinian holocaust.
I reiterate; I am not trying to guilt trip anyone, but for fux sake, people post pictures of food, their favorite beer (I’m one of them), their cat or dog and all sorts of other harmless meme’s. That’s OK, no problem with it. But to be honest folks, I have over 1000 friends on FB and many are former co-workers. I know they do not support this but I rarely see posts like this from many of them and many will not even “like” something I post on the subject or share it themselves.
I understand some people have jobs that could be threatened if they post anything political. I feel sorry for you that you are restricted like that, I am not sure I could stand it, but in the main I think people just feel helpless so what’s the point, life is bad enough, I can’t do anything so I ignore it.
But I remind you of the oft used statement from that preacher about first they came for the Jews, then the communists then the labor leaders etc etc. I’m sure the reader is aware of it.
We see the early stages of such behavior here in the US with the rounding up of immigrants which has a very racist undertone to them much like the attacks on Irish immigrants in Britain before other colonial people, non-whites began to arrive. We see the firings of dissenters in academia and revenge politics from the present president against any critic whether it be an individual or an institution like a university or law firm.
What is happening in Gaza is too dire for me to be overly concerned about hurting people’s feelings. But how can anyone claim to be a Christian or a Jew, and go to church or the temple and say. Nothing about this. There are Christian nationalists and there are Jewish extremists (Zionists) but no Christian or Jew who value the tenets of their faith should be silent about this, or passive.
I know Jews that have not said one word about Jewish extremists (Zionists) condemning this slaughter in their name. Imagine if a German refused to condemn Nazism and the furor that would generate. You should join the huge number of young Jews here in the US and the UK that are in the forefront of the pro-Palestinian movement. They are fighting anti-Semitism through their actions; Zionism promotes anti-Semitism and cannot exist without it.
I appeal to all of you who for one reason or another stay silent to change course as it does make a difference. It throws the crimes of the genociders in their faces. It has already changed the way the world sees this crisis. It prevents them from controlling the narrative. It helps if you do nothing else.
