I’m reprinting here my most recent Tomdispatch essay for The Nation Institute, on the possible emergence of a centrist Sunni bloc that aims to offset Israeli power in the region. Check out, as well, Tom Engelhardt’s essential introduction, here.

At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: the Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.

Breathtaking Hypocrisy

Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians. This summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law and, in response, the U.S. and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the global South have joined in its attempt to ostracize Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor forms of political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt, daggers long drawn over their differing views of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012-2013, have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.

The persistence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in pressing Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. security partner, to recognize Israel at a moment when the Arab public is boiling with anger over what they see as a campaign of genocide in Gaza, is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman the pitiful plea that he fears being assassinated were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in ordering the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has America’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed — anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.

Global Delegitimization

The science-fiction-style nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned that any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be considered an “act of war.” While such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, including bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has already begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza in its tactics. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even urged the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.

Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians from there now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the preference of 65% of Israelis polled. And mind you, when Israel and Jordan begin talking war you know something serious is going on, since the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War during the administration of President Richard Nixon.

In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, warned in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”

Turkey, a NATO ally with which the U.S. has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with President Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Still, until then their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even compared Netanyahu to Hitler, and then went further still, claiming that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”

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Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “sultan” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to prohibit that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic boycott on Israel, interrupting bilateral trade that had reached $7 billion a year and sending the price of fruits and vegetables in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles in the Israeli market.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns and rural areas and its Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. In addition, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.

The Alliance of Muslim Countries

Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president called for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:

“Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights advocate] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.”

In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first visit to Ankara on September 4th (following a February Erdogan trip to Cairo). And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.

Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012-2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.

Netanyahu’s Forever War in Gaza

For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. After all, the Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial damage on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with attacks on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. That has, in turn, diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.

Egyptians are also reportedly furious over Netanyahu’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of the city of Rafah in Gaza and his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives under the Camp David agreement to patrol that corridor. The al-Sisi government, which, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel, seems at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly tacked new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, causing the talks to fail.

For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry, insisting that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels. Egypt’s position was given support recently by Nadav Argaman, a former head of Shin Bet, who said, “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”

In the Turkish capital, Ankara, Al-Sisi insisted that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate ceasefire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with U.N. Security Council resolutions and pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”

To sum up, the ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes and the fury of their own people could, in the end, destabilize their rule. Countries that, not so long ago, had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies. And the alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.

That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position — or lack of one — on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too). Today, all too sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.

Copyright 2024 Juan Cole

Featured Image: “Erdogan and al-Sisi,” Digital, Dream /Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint/ Clip2Comic, 2024

Others among the victims of Monday’s bombardments were innocent male noncombatants, though note that the genocidal discourse in Israel alleges that there are no innocent Palestinians. The Israeli military is likely counting as Hamas militants all the able bodied males killed. As this carnage has become daily and routine, it has ceased being reported as significant news. As far as I can tell, US cable news simply ignores Gaza most of the time, with rare exceptions.

Although we concentrate on the estimate of at least 41,226 people killed in Gaza by Israeli bombs (and this is a gross underestimate) we often forget about the 95,413 wounded.

The World Health Organization estimates that 25% of of the wounded have undergone severe trauma (loss of limbs, severe burns, etc.) and require rehabilitative health care. That is, their injuries are life-changing.

TRT World Now: “WHO: 22,500 wounded Palestinians require long-term rehabilitation”

The estimate is based on records from Emergency Medical Teams on the ground in Gaza in the first half of this year

Injuries to major extremities — feet and hands — constitute a significant proportion of these injuries. WHO writes, “the majority are likely to be lower limb injuries, including complex fractures with peripheral nerve injuries.” There are on the order of 15,500 of these.

Then there are amputations (often done without anesthetic).

At one point in the war last winter, ten children a day had to have a limb amputated.

Video: The constant warfare in Gaza has created a new generation of child amputees | ABC News Australia

Who observes, “It is reasonable to expect that there are between 3105 and 4050 limb amputations.” At the upper range, that would be 22 amputations a day for the first half of this year.

Then, as the horror movie unfolds, WHO informs us that there have likely been 2000 or so spinal cord and severe traumatic brain injuries. That’s likely a lot of paralyzed or partially paralyzed people.

A similar number, about 2,000, have been badly burned.

One physician who worked in Gaza reported that 80% of the victims she saw were children.

Al-Jazeera Video: “80% of Gaza victims I treated were children – Surgeons in Gaza | Islamic Help ”

Under ordinary circumstances, providing rehabilitative care for a nearly 25,000 people would be a challenge. You’d need crutches and other prophylactics, wheel chairs, neck braces, spine braces, whirlpool baths for the burned to remove dead skin. Such things are now rare in Gaza or don’t even exist. The longer a patient with severe trauma goes without treatment, the greater the danger is that the injuries will never heal properly or will get worse. Israel keeps exiling Palestinians in Gaza from one place to the next. That would be hard on the ones with spine injuries or amputated legs. The ones with spine injuries could well be killed by such a move.

People ask me how they can help. Well, first chew out your Congressman and Senators for allowing this carnage to proceed. But here’s a link for UNICEF’s Gaza effort.

Haitian workers, having legally come into the U.S., started going to Springfield, Ohio, for jobs in 2018 when Trump was president. The Springfield municipal authorities needed workers and were happy to have them come in. Their numbers have almost certainly been vastly exaggerated.

In fact, the Trump administration did not cut immigration. Trump issued green cards at about the same annual rate as the Obama administration until the advent of COVID. The annual rate of green card issuance went back to normal under Biden-Harris but did not increase over what Trump had been doing. Trump’s immigration scare is just a scam — the US has been averaging about a million legal immigrants a year for a long time, and that continued under Trump before the pandemic.

Find more statistics at Statista

Why target Haitians? Some on social media have suggested that it is a slam at Kamala Harris’s paternal ancestry in Jamaica, an attempt to smear all Caribbean-Americans as deviants.

Haitians have fled Haiti in some numbers, but they aren’t the only emigrants from the Caribbean to the US and are not distinctive percentage-wise. There are about 1.1 million persons of Haitian descent in the U.S., while the population of Haiti is 11.5 million. That’s 9.5% of the population in the U.S. But there are 2.5 million persons of Dominican descent in the U.S., and the population of the Dominican Republic is almost identical to that of Haiti. That’s nearly 22% of Dominica in the US.

Haitian emigration, like all emigration, is driven by pull factors and push factors. The US economy and demand for jobs are pull factors. Natural disasters and gang governance are push factors. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 destroyed 200,000 homes and left over a million people without housing. Hurricanes have gotten more powerful and destructive because Americans put 4 or 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year from burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum. So Matthew was extra destructive and it is our fault. There are many reasons for which the US owes Haiti reparations.

The murder rate in Haiti is 40 per 100,000 per annum. In the US recently it is about 6 per 100,000 per annum. In France it is 1.4 per 100,000 per year, which shows just how violent the US is. But Haiti is more so.

The Trump-Vance smear of Haitians as eaters of family pets in part refers obliquely to the violent conditions from which Haitian immigrants have fled. There are some 200 armed gangs in Haiti. They have around 12,000 members. But obviously most Haitians are not gangbangers. In fact, 11,488,000 are not. As with Mexico, US-made semi-automatic weapons have flooded the island and worsened violence. But most Haitians are not violent or gangbangers, and the over one million in the US came here in part to get away from that kind of thing. Trump and Vance want to smear hard-working blue collar Haitian families.

This demonization of an entire ethnic group is typical of fascist politics. The Nazis also accused German Jews of spreading false rumors, of spreading diseases, and of being generally undesirable.

“Liberty Keffiyeh,” Digital, Dream / Realistic v2 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The targeting of Haitians resembles in some ways the demonization of Palestinians. Even their scarves, the keffiyeh, have been demonized. Palestinians have been accused of being intrinsically violent, as though it were a gene trait. I have long thought that given that they were kicked out of their own country and have been kept under a brutal occupation, they have responded with a remarkable lack of violence. Even now, as the Israeli military has slaughtered over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the bulk of them women and children, the Palestinians of the West Bank have been long-suffering. Indeed, most of the violence in the Palestinian West Bank has been committed by militant Israel squatters determined to steal Palestinian land.

A lot of the 160,000 Palestinian Americans seem to be professionals and small business people. Some of them have staged protests. The biggest rap against them seems to be that they protested without a permit (a charge that seems oblivious to what “protest” means.)

Palestinians can be killed with impunity because they are not considered human beings. A whole panoply of Israeli leaders have said that there are no innocent Palestinians, which is a genocidal statement. Just switch it around and consider how horrible it would be for someone to say that there are no innocent Jews.

And now, courtesy of rising American fascism, there are no innocent Haitians.

The authors say, “Contrary to the official Israeli pushback, research and analysis by Refugees International has corroborated evidence of a severe hunger crisis in Gaza and found consistent indications that famine-like conditions occurred in northern areas during the first half of 2024.”

Translation: The Israelis are lying about it, but there was famine in northern Gaza in February-March.

In this regard, they quote a Palestinian aid worker: “There were many cases of extreme starvation throughout Gaza, especially in the north. After the [November] ceasefire failed and the IDF controlled all access into Gaza, blocking entry points, there were very few supplies for two months… People would go out to get flour, stay out for three or four days [waiting for scheduled convoys], fail, and return home empty-handed, risking their lives for food.”

An UNRWA worker said, “Even when UNRWA sent aid convoys with flour and supplies [to the north], some were looted along the way. When they finally reached distribution points, the Israeli military fired on people trying to receive food aid—blood mixed with flour, it was horrible.” We know of several such “flour massacres” by Israeli troops.

The RI report continues, “Refugees International also found that the ebbs and flows in hunger conditions are closely linked to Israeli government restrictions and concessions on aid access, and to the conduct of the Israeli military.”

Translation: The Israeli military caused the famine by throttling aid and by military actions that made what aid did come into Gaza impossible to distribute.

Then they say, “International pressure on the Israeli government in March and April, following warnings of imminent famine in parts of Gaza, prompted a series of Israeli concessions around aid and commercial access.”

Translation: The International Court of Justice announced that “famine is setting in” in Gaza on March 29, 2024. The Biden administration freaked out at the reports reaching them from aid agencies on the ground in March-April and read Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the riot act, forcing him to let more food aid in and to stop obstructing its distribution with arbitrary bombings of the sort that killed 6 World Food Kitchen workers.

New paragraph: “These shifts enabled a brief period of stabilizing conditions in April that altered the rapidly worsening hunger trajectory seen in February and early March, and that likely deferred an otherwise imminent descent into widespread famine.”

Had it not been for this severe international pressure on Netanyahu, and his acquiescence to it, widespread famine would have broken out in Gaza this summer. The April food pipeline changed the situation dramatically.

They add, “However, this improvement was short-lived, and conditions have again been deteriorating badly since the Rafah offensive in May.”

Translation: When Netanyahu violated President Joe Biden’s red line and invaded and destroyed Rafah, he displaced over a million people yet again, engaged in widespread military maneuvers that destroyed Rafah city, and again made food hard to get. Likewise, he took control of the Rafah crossing, through which the Egyptians had allowed aid to enter, and shut it down. That loss of a key provisioning checkpoint again raised the specter of famine.

After Rafah, the food deliveries through Israeli checkpoints fell off a cliff, as the World Food Programme chart shows:

Hat tip Refugees International .

They conclude: “Without a more widespread and enduring course-correction on aid access, civilian protection, and humanitarian security, there remains a grave risk of famine conditions spiraling once again.”

Translation: The March projections of massive famine were temporarily averted but deadly hunger is now again stalking 2 million people.

They remind us that famine is defined by the IPC this way:

“Famine (IPC Phase 5) Definition: Famine is classified as an extreme deprivation of food affecting a population, leading to starvation, death, and destitution.”

It is officially declared when:
• 20% or more households cannot access enough food.
• 30% or more children suffer from acute malnutrition.
• Two or more deaths per 10,000 people happen daily due to starvation or related causes”

They plead with the Israeli government to 1) Open more border checkpoints for ongoing humanitarian access, and reinstate critical services to avert any further danger of famine; 2) Halt compulsory evacuations, which undermine the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts and significantly increase the vulnerability of Palestinian civilians; 3) Guarantee that the Israeli army strictly follows deconfliction protocols to ensure the safe passage of humanitarian aid and staff throughout Gaza; and 4) Remove all limitations on crucial aid supplies and allow UN agencies or agreed-upon neutral parties to conduct inspections, following models from Syria and Yemen.

I think we can reverse engineer these recommendations to conclude that the Israelis are not operating enough border checkpoints for entry of aid, and have cut off severely needed services that might forestall a famine.

Further, constant Israeli expulsions of Palestinians here and there are vastly increasing the problem of hunger and the likelihood of famine and they should cut it out.

Then, the Israeli military should stop firing on aid workers, killing and injuring them after careful agreements were crafted that the aid workers could safely operate.

Finally, the Israelis are limiting necessary aid supplies with their own arbitrary inspections. They often send back entire truckloads because they found one item they considered prohibited, like surgical scissors.

The report goes on to take apart the mealy-mouthed Israeli excuses and denials when presented with this reality.

Malnutrition is now 7 to 8% in some governorates of Gaza. Things all along have been worse than the projections.

RI warns, “As a result of these cumulative challenges, one UN official told Refugees International that Gaza was “always two weeks away from a famine” due to the IDF’s refusal to normalize free-flowing aid. UN health officials have reported a significant surge in documented malnutrition cases, with a 170 percent increase across Gaza and a staggering 300 percent rise in the northern region. The surge reflects a more comprehensive screening effort for Palestinian children, previously infeasible due to access constraints and security challenges. The new data reveals that many cases of acute malnutrition had gone unreported, as earlier figures had underestimated the crisis’s scale.”

If the apocalyptic figures coming out of Gaza were an underestimate, then the situation is dire indeed.

On Gaza, Harris said, “Well, let’s understand how we got here. On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. Many of them young people who were simply attending a concert. Women were horribly raped. And so absolutely, I said then, I say now, Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and we need the hostages out. And so we will continue to work around the clock on that. Work around the clock also understanding that we must chart a course for a two-state solution. And in that solution, there must be security for the Israeli people and Israel and in equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel. But we must have a two-state solution where we can rebuild Gaza, where the Palestinians have security, self-determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve.”

But that isn’t how we got there. The Israelis expelled 250,000 Palestinians to Gaza in 1948 from their homes in what became southern Israel, making Gaza a big refugee camp. The population has grown to 2.2 million. They detached from Gaza its agricultural lands and left it cut off from its markets. From 1967 the Israelis came after the Palestinians in Gaza again and occupied them. In 2007 they slapped an economic siege on the Gaza Strip, imposing 55% unemployment and causing children to be malnourished. So Hamas committed horrific terrorism on civilians on October 7 last year, for which there can be no justification. But if it had only attacked the Israeli military it might have had grounds in international law, which permits resistance groups to fight foreign military occupation. Harris left out the Nakbah or Palestinian displacement by Israel, and the long decades of military occupation and siege, so she made the story impossible to understand.

She is much better than Biden in at least expressing some empathy for the tens of thousands of innocent civilians Israel has killed in Gaza. But empathy, while better than nothing, won’t stop the killing, which is daily and directly enabled by US supply of weapons and ammunition (the Israelis ran out months ago).

The cease-fire deal she is touting does not exist. It was just a cheap trick pulled on Biden by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to giving him breathing space to continue the war, Netanyahu has constantly tacked on new conditions, most recently his occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of Rafah, which he knows Hamas (and even Egypt) will never agree to.

There is no two-state solution to be had, and politicians should start being honest about it. Gaza is rubble and there are hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters in the Palestinian West Bank. Where would you put a state?

Trump’s response was to say that the war would not have happened on his watch because he starved Iran of money. That assertion is not true and it isn’t a policy. It is just a narcissistic boast that he can magically control the world. He can’t.

As usual, what he said is arrant nonsense. The CIA assesses that Hamas did not tell Iran it was planning Oct. 7. Iran had nothing to do with it.

Further, Biden has kept all the Trump sanctions on Iran, which is not a good thing. It puts the US on a war footing with Iran. Washington tries to interfere in Iran’s normal commerce such as selling its oil. There are no grounds in international law for this behavior. The US has even sanctioned the Iranian national bank, making all economic transactions with Iran a form of terrorism, including sending food or medicine. It is unprecedented to call the national bank of a country a terrorist organization.

Trump has no policies, just insults, such as that Harris hates Israel and even hates Arabs because her hatred of Israel will get Arabs killed. I couldn’t follow the argument because of that arrant nonsense thing.

CNN: “Watch the full Second Presidential Debate Hosted by ABC”

Afghanistan was the other country in the greater Middle East that came up.

Harris expressed her agreement with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan, noting that four presidents had sought to withdraw, but he was the first to do so, saving the $300 million a day that the fruitless war was costing taxpayers. She said that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Harris blamed the debacle of the withdrawal on the “weak deal” negotiated directly with the Taliban by Don Trump, which she implied rather detracted from his reputation as a deal-maker. She said he by-passed the Afghan government and as part of his deal he released 5,000 Taliban terrorists. She expressed outrage that he would invite the Taliban to Camp David.

Harris is correct about the cost of the Afghanistan War, which came to $2.313 trillion over 21 years. That is $110 billion a year. Divided by 365, it comes to $301 million per day. Although al-Qaeda plotted the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan, it is not clear that they told the Taliban what they were planning, and it was kind of odd that Afghanistan, rather than the al-Qaeda network, should have been thought the danger to the U.S.

I’d say her account was accurate regarding the favorability of the deal Trump proposed to the Taliban. It is also true that Trump really wanted out of Afghanistan and kept telling his generals to get out, and they slow-rolled him. In some ways the story shows that on this issue Biden and Trump agreed. It isn’t for sure that Biden could have gotten a better deal than Trump on withdrawal. As for leaving the Afghan government out of the negotiations, that was weird. But given the way it collapsed and its top leaders were implicated in large-scale theft, it is not obvious that if Trump had included them in the talks, they could have obtained more favorable terms.

I don’t agree with her allegation that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.” I think the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria are in a war zone and that they are actively still fighting al-Qaeda, but also Shiite militias. Although the 2,500 US troops in Iraq are now classified as trainers, they do appear to be providing back up to the Iraqi Army in mopping up operations against ISIL in northern Iraq.

But the statement is also a little misleading because so many U.S. military interventions are aerial. The U.S. has been bombing Yemen regularly because the Houthis have been targeting container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea in support of the people of Gaza. You can’t just make this mini-war disappear because there are no boots on the ground. The US routinely bombs the al-Shabab extremist fundamentalist movement in Somalia.

In fact, in the past year the US has also bombed Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria in reprisal for their attacks on bases housing US troops in those two countries. The Shiite militias struck at the US in Iraq, Syria and Jordan in an effort to punish it for its heavy support to the Israeli total war on Gaza. When you are actively bombing Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Iraq you can’t be said to be entirely at peace.

“Prize Fight,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Trump boasted that in the 18 months after his deal with the Taliban, no US troops were killed in Afghanistan. This is true, but it is because he promised to get out of Afghanistan shortly if the Taliban ceased the attacks.

Trump said that the leader of the Taliban is “Abdul.” He was probably referring to the Taliban political chief in 2020, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Abdul is not a name on its own. It means “servant of” and is followed by a name of God. Abdul-Ghani means “servant of the All-Sufficient” (that is, God does not need anything because his essence is intrinsically rich). Baradar signed the deal for a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 2020.

Biden essentially followed the Trump treaty, though he delayed the promised US withdrawal from April 2021 to August. Although Trump is correct that the withdrawal was done chaotically, he was the one who guaranteed that it would be by his pledge to completely withdraw by a date certain. Trump’s claim that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine because of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is ridiculous.

Powerful flames swept through the tents, burning up at least 20 of them. The rockets left impact craters 9 meters / yards deep. There were some 200 tents at al-Mawasi, so ten percent were burned up by these air strikes.

The civil defense spokesman said that entire families had vanished into the sand during the bombardment, adding that early estimates indicate that we are confronting one of the ugliest massacres since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza.

The spokesman said that the Israeli air force had used heavy missiles in its raid on the tents of the refugees.

The Israeli military justified the killings in what they had designated a safe zone on the grounds that it included a Hamas command center.

As I have pointed out before, what the Israeli military likely actually means is that their drones, using biometric data, identified a couple members of the al-Qassam Brigades in the area and struck at them without regard to civilian casualities. The Israeli rules of engagement allow up to 20 civilian deaths per militant killed, so a death toll of 40 might indicate that two members of the al-Qassam Brigades were taken out. No civilized military has such a permissive ROE when it comes to civilian casualties. The extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to kill all 30,000 members of the al-Qassam Brigades in revenge for the October 7 attacks. It is not permitted, however, in the international law of war to simply murder enemy combatants who are not armed and not engaged in battle, and who are surrounded by civilians. Since October 7 was planned and executed by a small cadre of perhaps 3,000 elite commandos, it is possible that many rank and file Qassam Brigades members did not even know about it.

In a statement, Hamas denied that any of its gunmen were in the area of the airstrike.

Almost all of the 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza have been expelled from their homes repeatedly by the Israeli military, which has turned virtually the entire territory into refugee settlements. Ironically, 70% of Gaza families were made refugees in 1948 from their homes in Beersheba and elsewhere in southern Israel, so they have now been chased from their homes once again by the Israelis who had occupied their original domiciles in 1948. All Palestinians have been made like Jesus in Matt 8:20 : “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that the Israeli military has ordered Palestinians out of parts of northern Gaza where it was earlier agreed there would be a military pause so that children would receive polio shots. Only about a third of the children who must be vaccinated have been, with the Israeli air force pausing bombing runs in the morning and the early afternoon for makeshift vaccination centers, but resuming them in the late afternoon and evening. This procedure discourages families from gathering for the shots and endangers the health workers administering them.

Only half of the necessary medicines are now available in the Strip, with insulin supplies running very low, which is a death sentence for those with diabetes.

OCHA says that Israeli aerial and ground assaults persist throughout the Gaza Strip, inflicting additional civilian casualties, expulsions, and razing of residences and other non-military infrastructure. Ground maneuvers, especially in Beit Hanoun, southwestern Gaza City, eastern Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, and both east and south Rafah, with intense combat, are also still being reported, along with Palestinian rocket launches toward Israel.

Between the afternoons of September 5 and 8, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health (MoH), the Israelis killed 94 Palestinians in Gaza and 307 were injured.

From October 7, 2023, to September 8, 2024, at least 40,972 Palestinians were killed and 94,761 sustained injuries, as reported by the MoH in Gaza.

OCHA reports these Palestinian casualties at the hands of the Israeli military for this past Friday through Sunday:

” On 6 September, six Palestinians, including four women, were reportedly killed and five others injured when a residential building was hit near Bader Mosque in Az Zaytoun area, in Gaza city.

On 6 September, seven Palestinians were reportedly killed when a house was hit in An Nuseirat Refugee Camp in northern Deir al Balah.

On 6 September, five Palestinians were killed, including two women and two unidentified corpses recovered in pieces, and at least 10 others were injured when an apartment was hit in Al Yarmouk street, in central Khan Younis.
On 7 September, five Palestinians, including two children and two women, were reportedly killed, and others injured, when a house was hit in Al Bureij Refugee Camp in northern Deir al Balah.

On 7 September, at least eight Palestinians, including a boy, were reportedly killed and others injured in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in northern Deir al Balah.

On 7 September, six Palestinians, including two children and three women, were reportedly killed and others injured when a house was hit near the entrance of Al Bureij refugee Camp, in northern Deir al Balah.

On 8 September, five Palestinians including the Deputy Director for the Civil Defence (PCD) were reportedly killed and others injured when their house was hit in Jabalya. According to the PCD [Palestinian Civil Defense], the number of PCD staff killed so far has risen to 83.”

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

“40 killed, 60 wounded In Israeli Strike On Al Mawasi: Gaza Civil Defense | Dawn News English”

It is a serious subject, but the frivolity with which it is often treated by American politicians and judges needs some ridicule. Hence, the doggerel below.

I do not like the repeating gun.
I do not like the Smith & Wesson.

I do not think such guns are fun.
I would not like one on the run.
I would not like one when I’m done.
I would not like it, no, my son.

And would you like one on a road?
I would not like one on a road.
or people wounded as they rode.
I would not like one to unload
I would not like one to explode.
I would not watch that episode.
I would not like one on a road.

And would you like one in a school?
I would not like one in a school.
I would not think that’s very cool,
To see a Ruger with a fool,
or in the hands of a damned ghoul —
whose addled mind is a cesspool.
For children it would just be cruel.
I would not like one in a school.

And would you like one in a mall?
I would not like one in a mall.
I would not like it at nightfall
I would not like such a downfall
I would not like to see a brawl
That sort of thing does not enthrall
The blood and trauma would appall
I would not like one in a mall.

I would not, could not on a road.
I would not want him to reload.
I would not, could not in a school.
I would not, could not with a fool.
I would not, could not at a mall.
I would not, could not, not at all.

The occupation army said in a statement, “During activity of the security forces near the village of Beita today, the force responded with fire toward a principal instigator who was throwing stones toward the forces and constituted a danger to them. We are undertaking an investigation of reports of the death of a foreign national in the area, and the circumstances and details of her injury.”

(Cole: I call bullshit on this “statement.” It is illegal to fire live ammunition at unarmed protesters. Protesters do not pose a danger to heavily armed Israeli security forces. Eyewitnesses say that the real reason the Israeli troops opened fire was an attempt to stop the protest march, which of course is a war crime every which way from Sunday, or from Friday as the case may be.

Fellow protester Jonathan Pollack said, “It was quiet. There was nothing to justify the shot. The shot was taken to kill.”)

Moreover, The US State Department, which would have gone ballistic if Hamas or Putin had killed an American, issued mealy-mouthed pablum. They are going to “gather information.” But they didn’t act that way in other instances where a foreign military shot down an American in cold blood.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US would gather information on the Israeli killing of Turkish-American citizen Aysenur Ezgi Eygi and comment further later. pic.twitter.com/hDgmZhXTAO

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) September 7, 2024

The Turkish foreign ministry said, “We condemn the crime of murder committed by the Netanyahu government.”

Maghrebi writes that medical sources revealed that Eygi was struck by Israeli live fire in the head, suffering a grave wound, during the occupation army’s attempt to suppress a weekly march at Beita protesting the Israeli colonization of the West Bank. Strenuous efforts were made to save her life, but she succumbed to her wounds.

The director of the hospital, the Rafidia Surgical Hospital in Nablus, Fuad Nafiah, announced the death of the American solidarity protester, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi. As she reached the hospital, there was brain tissue outside her cranium. The medical team provided her with cardiopulmonary resuscitation for a few minutes, but she died of her injuries.

In the same incident, An 18-year-old young man was also injured by Israeli bullet shrapnel in the thigh.

American 🇺🇸 human rights activist shot to death by Israeli 🇮🇱 soldiers near Nablus, occupied West Bank, Palestine 🇵🇸

Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, a Turkish 🇹🇷 woman with American citizenship, was killed by Israeli army fire during a protest in the West Bank town of Beita, near Nablus… pic.twitter.com/6EK1BTgLn0

— Saad Abedine (@SaadAbedine) September 6, 2024

Local sources said that the occupation troops tried to stop the protest march at Beita, which lead to confrontations, in which Israeli troops let loose a volley of live fire and threw flash bombs and fired tear gas canisters (which can be fatal if they hit you) toward the protesters.

“Hope,” Digital, Dream / Impressionism v3, Clip2Comic, 2024

Eygi was participating in a program seeking to protect Palestinian farmers from harassment by Israeli squatters and by the Israeli military.

In 2003, an Israeli driving an earth mover bore down on Rachel Corrie, who had also gone to the West Bank as part of the International Solidarity Movement, killing her.

The Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hussein Sheikh, said that the Israeli occupation army’s killing of Eygi was “another crime added to the series of crimes being committed daily by the Israeli forces, which cry out for international courts to hold their perpetrators accountable.”

On Friday, as well, Israeli squatters also attacked the the village of Qaryout in Nablus, in the north of the Palestinian West Bank, beating a 30-year-old young man so badly they sent him to the hospital.

The Middle East Monitor has written,

“The town of Beita has turned into an icon of the popular resistance in occupied Palestine . . . Lying south of Nablus, Beita defends its property and land across the adjacent Mount Sabih area, part of which was seized by settlers to establish an illegal outpost that they called Eviatar, after a settler who was killed in a resistance operation there some time ago. It covers dozens of acres on the mountain, but there is a malicious plan to control hundreds more and establish a large settlement to isolate Beita and the neighbouring towns from their Palestinian surroundings, ending up as a major settlement network deep within the Palestinian cities, towns and villages in the West Bank.

The settlers took advantage of the Palestinian and global preoccupation . . . to establish the settlement outpost in Mount Sabih. The Israeli occupation army paved roads and connected infrastructure networks for the outpost, which is illegal even under colonial Israeli law, and the government actually ordered its removal . . .

The people of Beita rose up in defence of their land, future and destiny, by adopting the option of peaceful popular resistance around the clock, inspired by the atmosphere and uprisings in the occupied territories over the past few months. The town and its activities represented Jerusalem during the day and Gaza at night. The people carry out various activities and events during the day, including gatherings, demonstrations, sit-ins, seminars, speeches and festivals, and hold Friday prayers on Mount Sabih. All of this is accompanied by popular chants and traditional nationalist songs, including one specific to the town. At night, Beita and the surrounding area combine to become Gaza, with more robust popular resistance methods to create confusion. This includes the use of loudspeakers, flashing lights, lasers and fireworks, so that the settlers and the occupation army units sent to defend them cannot sleep.”

Earlier this year, the current fascist government in Israel legalized Eviatar in Israeli law, though it remains a gross violation of the 4th Geneva Convention and of the judgment of the International Court of Justice that the Israeli occupation is illegal.

Winter is ending in Australia, but it is worrisome that their August was among the hottest on record this year, presaging a hot dry summer to come, and raising the real risk of further massive bush fires of the sort that scorched the countryside and killed billions of animals in 2019-2020. The continent-country is highly vulnerable to climate change, with its two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, right on the sea and facing coastal erosion from sea level rise. It is unfortunate that so many Australian politicians and firms have found it so difficult to let go of coal and fossil gas. Although Australia is a relatively small country, the emissions of which are not all that consequential, it just sets a poor example for the rest of the world, especially for developing countries, if a very vulnerable country like Australia is a big coal user. How can it scold China and India for using so much coal, which really is consequential for the fate of the world, if Canberra is itself so irresponsible?

Although Australia has had a love affair with coal, the dirtiest and unhealthiest of the fossil fuels, even that addiction is beginning to subside. Less that 50% of the country’s electricity now comes from coal, an unprecedented development. Obviously, not all the states are as environmentally conscious and ambitious as South Australia.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory are particularly bad actors, actually expanding their use of coal and fossil gas.

Some other states have made great strides and have ambitious goals. South Australia has gone in big on solar energy and has largely dumped coal, and is employing batteries to store and use the solar energy when it is needed at night and at usage peaks during the day. The state wants to have all its electricity come from renewables by 2027, in only three years. And it is a highly plausible plan. Already, 70% of the electricity in South Australia comes from renewables, the best record of any large state by far, though the small Australian Capital Territory in which the capital of Canberra nestles has reached 100% renewable electricity generation and in Tasmania it is 98.2%. South Australia is lightly populated, but some of the more populous states are beginning to make strides as well.

In the country as a whole, there is good news. Since 2018, Australia has doubled the share of renewables in its electricity grid, and much of this increase in clean electricity has been spearheaded by states and territories rather than the federal government.

With a population of 26 million (a little bigger than Florida, a little smaller than Texas), Australia has about 10 million households. A full 3.6 million of them, about 36 percent, have rooftop solar installations. Half of all households in Queensland now have panels on their roofs.

“Outback Solar,” Digital, Dream /Dreamworld v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024.

In the US, a country 13 times the size of Australia, only 4.5 million households have rooftop solar. To be at the same level as Australia, we’d need 47 million households with rooftop solar. Given how sunny it is in the US south and southwest, it is crazy that we don’t have more, but conservative state legislatures in the back pocket of Big Carbon have often legislated obstacles. Australia’s homeowners clearly have managed to outmaneuver the Coal Lobby there. (We have solar panels and even in Michigan they much reduce our bill most of the year.)

The most populous Australia state, New South Wales, with over 8 million people, has made some strides in renewables. Some 35.6% of its electricity is from renewables, and 34% of its households have rooftop solar. 13% of its travel uses shared transportation, and there is an uptick in purchases of electric vehicles, though the absolute numbers remain small. NSW has banned offshore drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

South Australia, despite its thin population, is a technological leader in renewables. Not only do renewables supply 74.4% of electricity, but it has large battery projects that allow sunshine to be captured and used at night and at peak hours. The state hopes to phase out gas electricity plants in only a few years.

Batteries have also been key to California’s remarkable uptake of renewables.

Now Australia as a whole has six enormous battery projects in the pipeline.

At $1.7 trillion, Australia has the 13th largest GDP in the world. If the G20 states can get to carbon zero by 2050, that will solve the bulk of our climate worries, since all the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution will be absorbed by the oceans over time. The temperature will immediately stop rising and will decline over time. If we go on spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere after 2050, however, we will outrun the capacity of the oceans to absorb them, and the world will get very hot, and the climate could go chaotic.