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Gaza: Great March of Return still faces repression

CounterVortex

More than a year and a half after it was launched, the Great March of Return continues to mobilize weekly on the Gaza Strip border. The last Friday in October saw the 80th such mobilization—and was met with gunfire by Israeli security forces. Hundreds of Palestinians protested at various points near the border fence, with some setting tires on fire and throwing stones, Molotov cocktails and firecrackers at the Israeli forces—who responded by launching tear-gas canisters and opening fire with both rubber bullets and live rounds. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 95 civilians—including 43 children, a woman, two paramedics and a journalist—were injured by Israeli troops.

Did Assad sign off on Israeli air-raid in Syria?

Bill Weinberg

After years of presumed Israeli air-strikes on Iranian forces in Syria, the IDF finally carried out air-strikes that were publicly acknowledged, hitting a compound near Damascus supposedly shared by the Revolutionary Guards' elite Quds Force and Hezbollah militants. The strikes follow reports in the Israeli press that there is an "undeclared pact" between Assad and Netanyahu allowing Israel to strike Iranian targets in Syria in exchange for diplomatic assistance in regional "normalization" of the Assad regime. (Photo: Israel Aerospace Industries via Jerusalem Post)

Gaza invasion averted; West Bank land-grabs escalate

New Jewish Resistance

An Egyptian-mediated ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip took effect with no formal announcement, after two days of hostilities that saw the most extensive Israeli air-strike since 2014. Hidden from the headlines, the ongoing confiscation of Palestinian lands on the West Bank meanwhile continues. The day after the ceasefore, Israeli forces forced several Palestinian families to evacuate from their homes in northern Jordan Valley, in order to make way for military training. Days before, Israeli bulldozers uprooted some 120 fruitful olive trees west of Ramallah, to pave a settler-only road through the area. A document said to outline Donald Trump's "Deal of the Century" to end the Palestinian conflict calls for a reduced Palestinian state on lands not already appropriated by settlement blocs. The areas of the blocs are to expand, incorporating outlying settlements, and will remain under Israeli control—apparently amounting to a de facto annexation.

Netanyahu pledges to annex West Bank territory

New Jewish Resistance

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to annex areas of the occupied West Bank ahead of the coming week's Israeli Knesset elections. In an interview on Israeli TV, he was asked about plans to annex settlement blocs in the occupied territory, and responded: "Will we go to the next phase? The answer is yes. We will go to the next phase to extend Israeli sovereignty..." In a part of the interview seemingly reported in English only by the independent Palestinian Ma'an News Agency, Netanyahu also appeared to broach annexation of all Area C, the zone of mixed Israeli and Palestinian control, which covers 62% of the West Bank's territory. Asked about the future status of Area C, he reportedly replied: "I promise that you will be surprised. I cannot talk about the plan, but Trump is a big friend and I doubt there will ever be any bigger friend than him."

Escalation in Gaza; Orwell in Golan

New Jewish Resistance

Amid a new round of Israeli air-strikes on Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Donald Trump in Washington for the signing of a presidential proclamation officially recognizing the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory. At the joint press conference, Trump said, "We will confront the poison of anti-Semitism." We hope it is unnecessary to point out the perversity of Trump exploiting the threat of anti-Semitism to justify US recognition of an illegal Israeli annexation of Syrian territory.

Podcast: Ilhan Omar, anti-Semitism and propaganda

New Jewish Resistance

In Episode 29 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg advances a progressive, anti-Zionist critique of Rep Ilhan Omar's controvesial comments, which have posed the problem of US support for Israel in terms of "allegiance to a foreign country"—the nationalist and xenophobic language of our enemies. As a Somali-American woman in a hijab, Omar is ultimately legitimizing reactionary forces that threaten her with the use of such rhetoric. As the massacres of Christchurch and Pittsburgh too clearly demonstrate, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are fundamentally unified concers—and the way Jews and Muslims have been pitted against each other by the propaganda system is part of the pathology. Contrary to the canard of "dual loyalty," Weinberg decalres himself a "zero-loyalist," repudiating both Zionism and America-first nationalism, calling for an anti-Zionism based on solidarity with the Palestinians, not "allegiance" to the imperial state.

UN sees possible crimes against humanity in Gaza

Jurist

The UN Human Rights Council released the Report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, finding potential crimes against humanity committed by Israel. The report focuses on the seven-month period last year when the Gaza protest campaign known as the "Great March of Return and the Breaking of the Siege" was taking place. During this period, 6,106 unarmed protesters were shot by military snipers, resulting in 189 Palestinian deaths.

Palestinians reject Warsaw Conference

New Jewish Resistance

The secretary general of the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, Saeb Erekat, issued a statement rejecting the US-led conference in Warsaw, ostensibly aimed at brokering Middle East peace. Said Erekat: "Today we face a reality whereby the US Trump administration, in cooperation with the Polish government, is pushing yet a new initiative to annihilate the Palestinian national project." Poland has been making some efforts to resist turning the conference into a propagandistic anti-Iran meeting dominated by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The notable absentees from the summit are meanwhile convening their own meeting in the Russian resort of Sochi. The rival summit is bringing together Vladimir Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iran's Hassan Rouhani.