Peter Myers Digest: Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) split over Gaza; the Squad also split
(1) Greens & Green Left split over Gaza
(2) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) split over Gaza
(3) Paul Craig Roberts: Israel can now steal the rest of Palestine; this would end Netanyahu’s problems
(4) China sending humanitarian aid to Gaza, via UN agency & Palestinian national authority
(5) Seymour Hersh says IDF moved two battalions, each of 800 soldiers, from Gaza Fence to West Bank village for Sukkot
(1) Greens & Green Left split over Gaza
by Peter Myers, October 19, 2023
A serious split has developed in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) over Gaza. (item 2)
A similar split has occurred in Australia’s Greens. Green MPs and some TEALs have backed calls for a ceasefire, but other TEALs back Israel’s right to revenge.
Black Lives Matter has sided with Hamas. Antifa does not seem to have announced any policy.
AOC, perhaps mindful that a Jewish campaign could unseat her, has backed Israel’s right to revenge, but other members of the Squad defend Hamas.
This situation could change if Israel continues to commit atrocities.
Kevin Barrett, of False Flag Weekly News, who repeatedly calls ‘False Flags’, failed to call this one. He thinks that Hamas were just “shooting their way out” of the concentration camp. But where was the IDF?
Yet, Paul Craig Roberts (item 3) argues that Hamas should have foreseen that their attacks would legitimate Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and eviction of the Palestinians. Roberts notes, “It could be an Israeli operation from start to finish. Israel infiltrates Hamas”.
China’s aid to Gaza (item 4) may be a sign of the Confucian-Islamic alliance foreseen by Samuel Huntington. This would be a big worry for Biden. No doubt his trip was partly made to curtail Netanyahu’s war plans, because they threaten to fracture the Globalist Empire.
(2) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) split over Gaza; the Squad also split
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2023/10/18/dsas-existential-crisis-00122350
DSA’s existential crisis
By CATHERINE KIM
10/18/2023 07:00 PM EDT
FAULT LINES — Just as the Democratic Socialists of America finally got a toehold in electoral politics, the organization is at risk of losing it.
Israel’s war with Hamas has fractured the group, threatening its recent gains and its standing as a mainstream political voice.
The problem began the day after Hamas killed hundreds of Israelis in its first wave of attacks, when <https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/11/dsa-rally-aoc-israel-00121060>DSA’s New York chapter endorsed a pro-Palestine rally that provoked the ire of lawmakers, including some who had been among the group’s closest allies. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a leading voice of the organization, condemned the rally for expressing “<https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/10/aoc-pro-palestine-nyc-rally-00120684>bigotry and callousness.” Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) renounced his membership (though his local DSA chapter had <https://twitter.com/petersterne/status/1712212714804609101>already called for his expulsion), citing the “<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rep-shri-thanedar-cuts-ties-democratic-socialists-america-rcna120029>hate-filled and antisemitic rally in New York City.” In Los Angeles, City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who was endorsed by DSA just a month ago for her re-election campaign, disavowed the group for putting out a national statement that was “<https://twitter.com/nithyavraman/status/1711893596591595892>unacceptably devoid of empathy.”
While these lawmakers criticized Israel for its attacks on Gaza and the resulting deaths of Palestinian civilians, they expressed remorse for the death of innocent Israelis as well — a response more in line with the party establishment’s position. The DSA’s grassroots members, however, refused to condemn Hamas’ attacks, describing them as an <https://dsasf.org/dsa-sf-statement-on-palestine/>inevitable product of the fight for liberation. That characterization alienates mainstream Democrats who have been shocked by the brutal violence against Israeli civilians, even if they stand for Palestinian statehood like many other DSA members.
Infighting within the DSA — which now has nearly 100,000 members — has been common as the group grew into <https://jacobin.com/2020/10/new-york-city-democratic-socialists-of-america-elections>a force in Democratic Party politics in the wake of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Now, however, the divisions are especially acute as DSA’s elected members distance themselves from the vocal grassroots minority that is far more radical and less willing to compromise than the officeholders, who understand the need to build coalitions in order to have influence.
Of course, the divide doesn’t fall neatly along grassroots vs. officeholder fault lines — members of the progressive Squad in Congress have taken different tacks on the issue as well. Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.), in particular, have <https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1714720130452627616>taken flak from Republicans in Washington for their responses calling out Israeli occupation of Palestine in the wake of the Hamas attacks, while Ocasio-Cortez stuck to a more measured response. It’s worth noting that Sanders, perhaps the country’s most prominent democratic socialist, immediately condemned the Hamas attacks along with most congressional lawmakers.
DSA’s rhetoric has provided fodder for Republicans who are already using its response to the attacks as an opportunity to paint the Democratic Party as a group of <https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1714362315720835348>left-wing extremists. In New York, Republican state senators have called for their colleagues with DSA memberships to be stripped of their committee and leadership posts.
Until fairly recently, Democratic Socialists were largely without a voice in the halls of power and forced to watch from the sidelines. The war between Israel and Gaza might end up returning them to that status.
(3) Paul Craig Roberts: Israel can now steal the rest of Palestine; this would end Netanyahu’s legal problems
Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Puzzling
Paul Craig Roberts
October 9, 2023
I am being asked about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which seems to be taking attention away from the Ukraine-Russia conflict. People, by which I mean people who pay attention, are wondering why the Palestinians would attack Israel like this as it provides Netanyahu with an excuse to grab the remaining bits of Palestine and destroy the Gaza strip, thus disposing of the two-state solution by conquest. Who can blame Israel after Palestinians killed Israelis and took hostages?
I have heard the official explanation of Palestinian perfidy, but I don’t have an explanation for the attack. It seems it would have to be more than perfidy. I do agree with readers that it seems a curious thing for Hamas to do as it plays into Israel’s hands. I also agree that there is something else strange about the attack. How did drones and so many rockets, allegedly from Iran, and some say Ukraine, get into the Gaza strip, and how did the Hamas attackers get into Israel?
The Hamas attack has something of 9/11’s flavor. Just as every aspect of the US National Security State failed simultaneously on September 11, 2001, Israel’s security system, including the Iron Dome the US constructed for Israel, simultaneously failed. Mysteriously, the Hamas fighters entered Israel on the ground and through the air and on the sea without being detected. Mysteriously, large quantities of weapons entered Palestine through Israel without being detected. This is too much convenient failure to be believable. It will be interesting to see if anyone in Israel is held accountable for the total security failure. In the US no one was held accountable for the security failures on September 11, which should have told us a lot.
Not knowing, we can but speculate. We have a motive. Israel can now steal the rest of Palestine. Another motive might be that Israel can expand the conflict into a wider war and succeed this time in grabbing the water resources of southern Lebanon. It could even get nastier with Israeli moves against Syria and Iran. Oil prices could go sky high causing world disruption. A victorious war and the end of the Palestinian problem would free Netanyahu from his legal and political problems. There is a lot to think about.
But let’s move on to the security failure that made the attack possible. Why would Netanyahu enable Hamas to attack Israel by standing down Israel security? It seems a nonsensical suggestion, but isn’t as it creates the conditions in which Israel can absorb all that remains of Palestine, just as 9/11 created the conditions for the neoconservatives to launch the wars they had planned in the Middle East.
The difficult question is why would the Palestinians bring on their own destruction by attacking Israel when Hamas has no prospect of defeating Israel? Again, we can only speculate. It could be an Israeli operation from start to finish. Israel infiltrates Hamas, just as the FBI infiltrates Trump supporters and patriotic groups now called domestic terrorists. The Israeli agents play up Israel’s abuse of the Palestinians. Netanyahu helps them along by blowing up the sacred Mosque. The agents come up with an attack plan made possible with weapons from Iran and devices from Iran to jam Israeli security. They go about this carefully, relying on the decades of anger and hurt and the prospect of release from impotence to crowd out Hamas’ reason.
I don’t say these speculations suffice as the explanation. But I would not be surprised if these speculations, if investigated, would prove to be closer to the truth than whatever official narrative emerges.
(4) China sending humanitarian aid to Gaza, via UN agency & Palestinian national authority
Signs of the Confucian-Islamic alliance foreseen by Samuel Huntington – Peter M.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/china-sending-emergency-humanitarian-aid-to-gaza/3021783
China sending emergency humanitarian aid to Gaza
Aid being shipped through UN agency, Palestinian national authority, says official
Riyaz ul Khaliq |16.10.2023 – Update : 17.10.2023
ISTANBUL
China on Monday said it is shipping humanitarian aid to meet the urgent needs of those in the Gaza Strip.
Xu Wei, spokesman for China International Development Cooperation Agency, said the aid is being shipped through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Palestinian National Authority, according to Chinese broadcaster CGTN.
Ten days into the conflict with Palestinian group Hamas, Israeli bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip has continued, with over 1 million people – almost half the total population of Gaza – having been displaced.
Gaza is experiencing a dire humanitarian crisis with no electricity, and water, food, fuel and medical supplies are running out, as civilians flee to the south following Israeli warning to evacuate northern areas.
The fighting began when Hamas on Oct. 7 initiated Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, a multi-pronged surprise attack including a barrage of rocket launches and infiltrations into Israel via land, sea, and air. It said the incursion was in retaliation for the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and increased settler violence.
The Israeli military then launched Operation Swords of Iron against Hamas targets within the Gaza Strip.
The number of Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza has risen to 2,750, including 750 children.
In Israel, 1,300 have been killed.
On the armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, Beijing has said the “crux of the matter” was a denial of justice to Palestinians.
In several statements, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has called on Israel to heed international law and stop “collective punishment” of the oppressed people.
Speaking to his US counterpart Antony Blinken over the phone, Wang said: “There is no way out through military means, and using violence for violence will only create a vicious cycle.”
“The Israeli people have received assurances of their survival, but who is ensuring the survival of the Palestinian people,” Wang asked during a news conference, alongside EU foreign affairs chief Joseph Borrell, in Beijing.
“The Israeli nation is no longer in a state of diaspora, but when will the Palestinian nation be able to return to their homeland,” he questioned.
Beijing urged all sides of the conflict to refrain from escalating the situation and return to negotiations as soon as possible.
China is also dispatching its special envoy for Middle East affairs Zhai Jun to visit the regional nations this week while Beijing has insisted that the “two-state solution” was a “fundamental way out” of the conflict.
(5) Seymour Hersh says IDF moved two battalions, each of 800 soldiers, from Gaza Fence to West Bank village for Sukkot
This article by Hersh is at Global Research, whose editor (Michel Chossudovsky) endorses LIHOP. Hersh gives an alternative explanation to LIHOP, but it’s not convincing. Why move two whole battalions to protect a West Bank village? This would seem to be an excuse put forward by Netanyahu, to explain the (deliberate) ‘intelligence failure’. Even so, 800 troops remained at the 51-km long Fence, which works out at one per 64 metres; they would still have noticed the breakout. Not does Hersh’s excuse take account of the sensors which report any penetration of the Fence. This was a Stand Down, as during 9/11. Such explanations are found in the dissident media, but the mainstream media only mentions them when ridiculing them as misinformation.
Nor is Hersh right to proclaim that Netanyahu is finished. Many people wrote him off years ago. The current mood in Israel makes it impossible for the Supreme Court to strike down the law reducing its powers, which the Knesset passed. That, even on its own, represents a triumph for Netanyahu; and he could emerge a victor in the coming war and ethnic cleansing. – Peter M.
“Netanyahu is Finished”, “He is a Walking Dead Man”. Seymour Hersh
“Netanyahu is Finished”, “He is a Walking Dead Man”. Seymour Hersh
The Bibi doctrine—his belief that he could control Hamas—compromised Israeli security and has now begat a bloody war
By Seymour M. Hersh
Global Research, October 17, 2023
Decades ago I spent three years writing <https://substack.com/redirect/71f8ab62-f103-489a-93d0-34d89a8540ca?j=eyJ1IjoiMXVzdzFxIn0.I1fVM1VzWZWiau5u7djAsGkUDBVF57AWgs5J_JCeFBg> The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book.
.
My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken far more comprehensive studies, as some of the most highly classified Israeli and US documents have become public.
I chose not to go to Israel to do my research in fear of running afoul of Israeli national security law. But I found Israelis living abroad who had worked on the secret project and were willing to talk to me once I indicated I had information from American intelligence files. Those who worked on such highly classified materials have remained loyal to Israel, and a few of them became lifelong friends of mine. They have also remained in close touch with former colleagues who stayed in Israel.
This is an account of the past week’s horrific events in Israel, as seen by a veteran of Israel’s national security apparatus with inside knowledge of recent happenings.
The most important thing I needed to understand, the Israeli insider told me, is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
“is finished. He is a walking dead man. He will stay in office only until the shooting stops . . . maybe another month or two.”
He served as prime minister from 1996 until 1999 and again, as leader of the right-wing Likud Party, from 2009 to 2021, returning for a third stint in late 2022. “Bibi was always opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords,” the insider said, which initially gave the Palestinian Authority nominal control over both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When he returned to office in 2009, the insider said, “Bibi chose to support Hamas” as an alternative to the Palestinian Authority, “and gave them money and established them in Gaza.”
An arrangement was made with Qatar, which began sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the Hamas leadership with Israeli approval. The insider told me that “Bibi was convinced that he would have more control over Hamas with the Qatari money” —let them occasionally fire rockets into southern Israel and have access to jobs inside Israel—than he would with the Palestinian Authority. He took that risk.
“What happened this week,” the insider said,
“was a result of the Bibi doctrine that you could create a Frankenstein and have control over it.”
The attack by Hamas was a direct result of a decision Bibi made, over the protest of local military commanders, “to allow a group of Orthodox settlers to celebrate Sukkot in the West Bank.”
Sukkot is an annual fall holiday that commemorates the ancestral journey of Jews into the depths of the desert. It is a weeklong festival that is observed by building an outdoor temporary structure known as a sukkah in which all could share the food that their predecessors ate and viscerally connect to the harvest season.
The request came at a time of extreme tension over another West Bank incident in which Jewish settlers, according to the Associated Press, “rampaged through a flashpoint town” on October 6 and killed a 19-year-old Arab male. The youth’s death, the AP report added, “marked the latest in a surge in Israeli-Palestinian fighting that so far has killed nearly 200 Palestinians this year—the highest yearly death toll in about two decades.”
The Sukkot celebration, held near a Palestinian village known in Hebrew as Haware, would need extraordinary protection, given the tension over the latest violence, and the local Israeli military authorities, with the approval of Netanyahu, ordered two of the three Army battalions, each with about 800 soldiers, that protected the border with Gaza to shift their focus to the Sukkot festival.
“That left only eight hundred soldiers,” the insider told me,
“to be responsible for guarding the 51-kilometer border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. That meant the Israeli citizens in the south were left without an Israeli military presence for ten to twelve hours. They were left to fend for themselves. And that is why Bibi is finished. May take a few months, but he is over.”
{= 16 per km = 1 every 160m. Even so, they would have noticed the breakout. And sensaors would have reported it.
If Netanyahu wanted to LIHOP, he had to sending the troops somewhere; this was just an excuse. No need for 1600 troops at the Sukkot event}
The insider called the attack in southern Israel “the great military failure in Israeli history” and pointed out that “only soldiers were killed in the ’73 war”—the surprise attack on Yom Kippur in which Israel was briefly overrun by Egyptian and Syrian troops.
“Last Saturday twenty-two settlements in the south were under control of Hamas for hours, and they went house to house slaughtering women and children.”
There will be a military response, the insider said, noting that 360,000 reservists have been called up.
“There is a big debate going on about strategy. The Israeli Air Force and Navy special forces are ready to go, but Bibi and the military leadership have always favored the high-tech services.
The regular army has been used primarily as security guards in the West Bank … The reality is that the ground forces are not trained for combat. Don’t misunderstand—there is confidence in the spirit of the troops but not in their ability to succeed in the ‘special situation’ that the soldiers would be facing in a ground assault” in the ruins of heavily bombed Gaza City.
The reservists are now undergoing crash training and a decision of what to do may come by the end of this week, the insider said. Meanwhile, the current bombing of civilian targets—apartment buildings, hospitals, and mosques—no longer includes a token civilian safeguard. In prior attacks in Gaza City, he said, the Israeli Air Force often would drop a small bomb on the roof of a civilian facility to be targeted—it was called “a knock on the roof”—that would theoretically alert noncombatants to flee the building. That is not happening in the current round-the-clock bombing raids.
As for a ground attack, the insider told me that there is a brutal alternative under consideration that could be described as the Leningrad approach, referring to the famed German effort to starve out the city now known as St. Petersburg during World War II.
The Nazi siege lasted nearly 900 days and the death toll was at least 800,000 and possibly many more. It is known that the Hamas leadership and much of its manpower “live underground,” and Israel’s goal is to destroy as much of that manpower “without attempting a traditional house-to-house attack.”
The insider added that some Israelis were “made anxious” by the initial statements from world leaders in Germany, France, and England who avowed, in one case through an aide, their total support for an immediate response but added that it should be guided by the rule of law. President Biden reinforced that point in an unscheduled appearance at a White House conference of Jewish leaders Wednesday by pointedly saying that he had recently told Netanyahu: “it is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration and just—I don’t know how to explain it—that exists is that they operate by the rules of war—the rules of war. And there are rules of war.”
The option now under consideration, the Israeli insider told me, is to continue the isolation of Gaza City in terms of power supply and the delivery of food and other vital goods.
“Hamas now only has a two- or three-day supply of purified water and that, along with a lack of food,” I was told, “may be enough to flush all the Hamas out.” At some point, he said, Israel may be able to negotiate the release of some prisoners—women and children—in return for food and water.
“The big debate today,” he said,
“is whether to starve Hamas out or kill as many as 100,000 people in Gaza. One Israeli assumption is that Hamas, which has received as much as $1.6 billion from Qatar since 2014, wants to be seen as a sovereign that takes care of its people. He went on: “Now that President Biden says they are a terrorist state, Hamas may have reason to want to be seen as less hostile and there might be a chance for calm and rational discussion about prisoners—and a release of some of its Israeli hostages, beginning with women and children.”
The other prisoners will be treated like prisoners of war, he said, and their release could be negotiated, as has happened in the past.
But, the insider added, “the more we all see” of Hamas brutality on TV and “the more Hamas is seen as another ISIS, time gets short.”
The reality, he said, is that Hamas is not rational and is incapable of any negotiations, and Qatar will not intervene. And, barring some international or third-party intervention, there may be a general ground invasion with untold deaths to all sides and to all prisoners.
The decision to invade in full force is Israel’s, and it has not yet been made.