#Israeli security cabinet

[destielmemenews]

"Israel’s military says it launched several strikes on Hezbollah targets in southern Beirut Tuesday, part of a broader offensive that began in September, killing top commanders, carrying out waves of strikes and sending troops into southern Lebanon, with the stated war goal of allowing displaced Israelis to return to northern areas.

More than 3,000 people have been killed in Lebanon since then, according to a CNN tally. And more than a million Lebanese people have been displaced.

In Gaza, the Israel-Hamas war rages on, with the death toll surpassing 44,200, according the [sic] Palestinian health ministry. Meanwhile, heavy rains in recent days have flooded makeshift camps, where displaced Palestinians are bracing for a harsh winter, according to the UN."

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[vyorei]

WHAT THE FUCK?

[airplanefoodblackmarket]

God, I fucking hate Netanyahu so fucking much.

[sayruq]

An Iranian military security official has revealed exclusively to The Cradle that the US contacted the Islamic Republic, asking the nation to allow Israel "a symbolic strike to save face” following Iran's retaliatory drone and missile barrage this weekend. “Iran has received messages from mediators to let the regime do a symbolic strike to save face and asked Iran not to retaliate,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, revealed to The Cradle. He added that Tehran “outright rejected” the proposal, delivered by mediators, and reiterated warnings that any Israeli attack on Iranian soil would be met with a decisive and immediate response.

The revelations come as US defense officials have told western media that they expect a “limited response” from Israel against Iran, which will reportedly focus on targets outside of Iranian territory. Nevertheless, US officials stressed that Tel Aviv had not briefed the Pentagon on a “final decision” as discussions within Israel's fractured war cabinet continued. “The US does not intend to take part in the military response,” they confirmed. However, they expect Israel to inform Washington about response plans in advance.

[brexiiton]

Israeli security cabinet convenes over ongoing terror wave

blocked youtube video [x] Israeli security cabinet convenes over ongoing terror wave

[workersolidarity]

[ 📹 A father checks on his injured son laying on the floor of a local hospital after the Israeli occupation forces bombed their home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, resulting in a number of casualties. ]

🇮🇱⚔️🇵🇸 🚀🏘️💥🚑 🚨

273 DAYS OF GENOCIDE IN GAZA: ISRAELI OCCUPATION SENDS DELEGATION TO RENEW HOSTAGE EXCHANGE TALKS WITH HAMAS, GAZA TO FACE DISASTER AS FUEL BEGINS TO RUN OUT, ISRAELI OCCUPATION ARMY CONTINUES MASS SLAUGHTER OF PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS

On 273rd day of the Israeli occupation's ongoing special genocide operation in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a total of 4 new massacres of Palestinian families, resulting in the deaths of no less than 58 Palestinian civilians, mostly women and children, while another 179 others were wounded over the previous 24-hours.

It should be noted that as a result of the constant Israeli bombardment of Gaza's healthcare system, infrastructure, residential and commercial buildings, local paramedic and civil defense crews are unable to recover countless hundreds, even thousands, of victims who remain trapped under the rubble, or who's bodies remain strewn across the streets of Gaza.

This leaves the official death toll vastly undercounted as Gaza's healthcare officials are unable to accurately tally those killed and maimed in this genocide, which must be kept in mind when considering the scale of the mass murder.

The Israeli occupation Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his Security Cabinet have implemented the decision to send a delegation to meet in Doha, Qatar, for hostage exchange talks with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas.

Netanyahu met with his negotiating team prior to their departure to stress "again that the war will end only after achieving all of its goals, and not one moment earlier."

Meanwhile the occupation Prime Minister held a phone call with US President Joe Biden where Netanyahu reiterated his commitment to the Israeli occupation's goals in its ongoing genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, even as the occupation sends it's delegation to meet with the Hamas resistance group he swears to destroy.

The Israeli negotiating team will be led by the Mossad Chief David Barnea, who is expected to meet with the Hamas delegation prior to the arrival of the rest of his team, who will be brought in if the negotiations progress.

US Officials say they are optimistic that a deal can be reached, and the Americans said they welcomed the decision of the Israeli Prime Minister to send his delegation to Doha to continue with talks.

An anonymous American official who spoke with Reuters on Thursday evening said the Hamas proposal “includes a very significant breakthrough.”

"It can serve to advance negotiations. There’s a deal with a real chance of implementation. Though the clauses are not easy, they shouldn’t scupper the deal,” the official continued.

Another senior official told reporters on a conference call on Thursday that Hamas had made a significant adjustment in its demands for a hostage exchange deal, and expressed hope that it could lead to an agreement that would be a step towards an eventual ceasefire.

“We’ve had a breakthrough,” the official said in the call, going on to add that there were still some outstanding issues related to implementation of the agreement, and that a deal was not expected to be closed for several days.

The latest proposal is closely related to the one outlined by President Biden in a speech he gave back in May, which would introduce a format based on three stages of talks, which could ultimately lead to an eventual ceasefire and the release of all hostages.

The Israeli Prime Minister has faced intense criticism from both sides; some that want the government to reject all talks, versus groups such as the mother's of the hostages being held by the Palestinian Resistance who continue protests, demonstrating in Habima Square in Israeli-occupied Tel Aviv, joined by more than a thousand protesters to demand the Netanyahu regime come to a deal for the release of all hostages.

Meanwhile, in other news for Friday, July 5th, the World Health Organization (WHO) is warning the Gaza Strip faces a fuel shortage which could result in "catastrophic" consequences, as the enclave's healthcare system faces a potential collapse of basic services that require electricity to function.

Speaking on the social media platform X, WHO Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that "Further disruption to health services is imminent in Gaza due to a severe lack of fuel."

The WHO warned that just 90'000 liters of fuel entered the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, even as the healthcare sector alone requires a minimum of 80'000 liters daily just to provide basic care.

Fuel also must be provided to the some 21 ambulances which are still operational in Gaza, while the WHO said that fuel supplies were currently being rationed to "key hospitals", including the Nasser medical complex and Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis, as well as the Kuwaiti Hospital in the city of Rafah, in Gaza's south, while the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Yunis has been out of service since Tuesday under threat of Israeli bombardment.

Further, Tedros Ghebreyesus gave warning that “losing more hospitals in the Strip would be catastrophic.”

In other news, the skin disease known as "scabies" has begun to spread widely among the Palestinian populations in densely populated camps, where Palestinian refugees in Gaza have taken shelter during the ongoing genocide.

Medical sources in Gaza say the accumulation of sewage water between the tents of the displaced, combined with the lack of hygiene due to the scarcity of clean water and basic necessities such as soaps and detergents, threatens to cause the accelerated spread of various infectious diseases and epidemics.

Currently, around 2 million displaced Palestinians live in shelters and camps under harsh conditions, with few resources or necessities that the population needs.

Worse still, a severe shortage of medicines and medical supplies threatens complications for the sick and wounded, who've packed into Gaza's hospitals by the hundreds and thousands. Already, dozens of Palestinians have died due to the shortage of medicines and supplies.

Since the start of the Israeli occupation's genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, international institutions and non-governmental organizations have warned of the spread of disease and epidemics among the displaced as overcrowding and a decline in personal hygiene has overtaken the majority of the population.

Medical sources have confirmed that thousands of Palestinians remain under threat of death as a result of continued lack of medicines, supplies, hygiene products and fuel for generators at the handful of remaining hospitals after 10 months of Israeli bombardment.

At the same time, the Israeli occupation's genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues unabated as the occupation army intensified its bombing and shelling of residential neighborhoods and shelters, as well as public infrastructure.

In some of the latest attacks, Occupation warplanes bombed the Sheikh Nasser area, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of two Palestinians who were transported to the Nasser medical complex in the city.

Similarly, Israeli fighter jets bombed a house in the Nuseirat Camp, in the central Gaza Strip, killing four civilians and wounding several others, while two others were killed after Zionist air forces bombed a gathering of civilians in the Al-Mawasi area, northwest of the city of Rafah, south of Gaza.

In another atrocity, Israeli occupation aircraft bombed a house belonging to the Al-Rifai family in the Al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City. After the bombing, civil defense crews and local residents managed to recover the bodies of two citizens killed in the strikes.

The horrors continued in Gaza's north when the Israeli occupation army bombed a site in Jabalia al-Balad, killing 5 Palestinian civilians, including at least 3 children, and wounding a number of others.

At the same time, occupation artillery shelling pummeled several areas in the town of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, as well as the Nuseirat Camp in central Gaza.

In another assault, Zionist warplanes bombed a residential home belonging to the Al-Bardawil family in the Al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City, resulting in the deaths of 4 civilians and wounding several others who were taken to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city.

Simultaneously, occupation fighter jets bombarded the eastern neighborhoods of the Al-Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, coinciding with intense gunfire from Zionist soldiers, who detonated a number of homes in the neighborhood, continuing the army's systematic destruction of Palestinian housing.

In another massacre, Israeli occupation forces bombed a residential house belonging to the Khader family on Old Gaza Street in the town of Jabalia, north of Gaza, killing 5 civilians, including Bassam Khader, his wife and three children.

The atrocities continued with the bombing of an Israeli occupation drone, which targeted Al-Sikka Street east of the Jabalia Camp, north of Gaza, resulting in the death of a civilian and injuring three others who were transported by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya.

Another body of a Palestinian who was killed by the occupation army near the Tahrir Station on Salah al-Din Street, east of the city of Rafah, was transferred to Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis.

Meanwhile, Israeli artillery shelling targeted the Al-Nasr area, northeast of Rafah City, while at the same time, Zionist armored vehicles and other military vehicles penetrated into the Abu Halawa and Abu Al-Hussain areas, as well as the outskirts of the Al-Nasr area, east of Rafah City.

Additionally, occupation fighter jets bombed a home belonging to the Radwan family in the town of Bani Suhaila, east of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, resulting in the death of Adly Radwan, and wounding his wife, who was transported to the Nasser medical complex in the city.

The Israeli occupation forces also fired flares in the southeast of Khan Yunis, while Zionist warplanes bombed an uninhabited house in the town of Abasan Al-Kabira, east of the city.

The Zionist army went on to hammer the northwest of the Al-Nuseirat Camp, in central Gaza, using artillery shelling and gunfire, while occupation artillery shelling also targeted the north of Al-Zahra'a city, also in central Gaza.

As a result of the Israeli occupation's ongoing war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, the endlessly rising death toll now exceeds 38'011 Palestinians killed, including upwards of 10'000 women and well over 15'000 children, while another 87'445 others have been wounded since the start of the current round of Zionist aggression, beginning with the events of October 7th, 2023.

July 5th, 2024.

(No updated figures for death toll have been announced for July 5th)

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@WorkerSolidarityNews

[girlactionfigure]

onthisdayinjewishistory

In August, 2005, the Israeli army forcibly removed 8,600 Jewish residents of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip from their homes after a decision from the Israeli Cabinet to do so in the name of “peace”.   The Jewish communities were demolished as part of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. By 2006, H*mas forcibly took over Gaza, turning it into a terrorist den that has only worsened quality of life for both Israelis and Palestinians alike. Starting in 2007, rockets began raining down regularly on Israel, launched primarily by H*mas. In 2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021, Israel carried out extensive military operations to counter the different terror groups in Gaza. On October 7, 2023, Israel received the harshest reminder yet of the danger in exchanging this small piece of land for “peace” when thousands of Palestinians led by H*mas terrorists invaded Israel from Gaza - m*rdering over 1300 people, kidnapping 200+, r*ping others and laying waste to the kibbutzim and the Nova festival on the Gaza border. As of this post, 109 hostages remain in Gaza. In 2004, then PM Ariel Sharon promoted a plan to withdraw from Gaza, claiming that the “the purpose of the plan is to lead to a better security, political, economic and demographic reality”.  Protestors took to the streets weekly to voice their vehement opposition and support of the plan. In a show of national division, citizens wore colors to show their stance, blue in support of the disengagement and orange in opposition. The decision to evict the Jewish residents of Gush Katif was one of the most challenging periods in Israeli history. Israeli soldiers were ordered to remove their fellow citizens from their homes and communities. The decision was made in the hopes that by pulling out the residents of Gush Katif, Israel would be safer. In retrospect, Israel’s evacuation has only made Israel less safe. 19 years later this decision is referenced regularly in Israel when talking about giving land away and Jews living in disputed territories - today, amidst the ongoing war, more than ever before.

[tieflingkisser]

Israel is considering a plan to deploy private US logistics and security companies to create a "gated community" in Gaza where Palestinians would be subjected to biometric screenings to receive aid, according to media reports.  Drop Site News reported on Monday, citing Israeli media, that Israel's war cabinet discussed the proposals on Sunday, and was set to approve a "pilot" programme within the next two months.  According to Israeli news outlet Ynet, Global Delivery Company (GDC), which is run by Israeli-American businessman Mordechai Kahana, is in talks with the Israeli government to run the programme.  Israel has long discussed the idea of so-called "humanitarian bubbles" in northern Gaza, in which it would allow aid into an area if it deemed there was no presence of fighters.  Large parts of northern Gaza, in particular the Jabalia refugee camp, have been under a total siege over the past 17 days, with Israeli forces not allowing any food, clean water and medical supplies to enter. 

[mariacallous]

WASHINGTON – Four weeks before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes power, all his rhetoric and appointments are indicating that his campaign's vow to crack down on pro-Palestinian sentiment in America will be a defining factor of his administration's early days.

Throughout the campaign, both Trump and the Republican Party insisted that such a clampdown would be quick and complete. After Trump's speedy cabinet appointments and ahead of a Congress ruled by a GOP majority, the fight against the pro-Palestinian movement might be one of the only things that has a clear path across the government.

Once Trump's picks for the top diplomatic positions are in place, such as Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, the harshest step – the deporting of pro-Palestinian protesters who have student visas – could be the first move. Both Rubio and Stefanik are well-known proponents of such a step, one of Trump and the GOP's few solid policy commitments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the campaign.

In October, Rubio wrote to the current secretary of state, Antony Blinken, urging him to "immediately perform a full review and coordination effort to revoke the visas of those who have endorsed or espoused Hamas' terrorist activity."

Stefanik, meanwhile, has doubled down on her star-making turn as university-president interrogator by calling for students' deportation. She told Fox News in May that these students "are pro-Hamas members of a mob who are calling for the eradication of Israel. They are calling for genocide against Jews around the world and in America. It is unthinkable that we are allowing this to happen at U.S. universities."

The blueprint is there

Other nominees more focused on domestic matters have also suggested that the pro-Palestinian protest movement will be a key issue. Among them is Pam Bondi, Trump's second attempt at a nominee for attorney general. The former Florida attorney general has called for a revocation of visas and condemned the campus protests.

The thing that's really the most troubling to me [are] these students in universities in our country, whether they're here as Americans or if they're here on student visas, and they're out there saying 'I support Hamas,'" she told Newsmax last year.

Bondi added: "Frankly they need to be taken out of our country or the FBI needs to be interviewing them right away."

Trump's choice to lead the FBI is controversial loyalist Kash Patel. While the former federal prosecutor doesn't have much of a record on campus protests, he is most notorious for his desire to remove any of Trump's critics and doubters from the national security apparatus.

Further, Patel's experience as the National Security Council's senior director of counterterrorism during Trump's first term positions him to crack down on pro-Palestinian sympathizers. A blueprint for this is detailed in Project Esther, a plan to combat antisemitism unveiled by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind Project 2025, the 922-page paper outlining conservatives' plans to fundamentally alter the government.

The underlying thesis of Project Esther – a more tractable 33 pages – is that "America's virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American 'pro-Palestinian movement' is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)."

The task force's mission statement calls for a coalition to "dismantle the infrastructure" that purportedly sustains the alleged network. This would take one to two years. "Supported by activists and funders dedicated to destroying capitalism and democracy, the HSN benefits from the support and training of America's overseas enemies," the document states.

It adds that this network "seeks to achieve its goals by taking advantage of our open society, corrupting our education system, leveraging the American media, coopting the federal government, and relying on the American Jewish community's complacency."

The document suggests how a potential Trump administration would crack down on protesters, something he has promised. It also calls for the deporting of protesters in the United States on student visas and the targeting of universities' tax-exempt status. It notes laws that might "exploit [the network's] vulnerabilities," require representatives of foreign entities to disclose their connections, and target organized crime and racketeering.

Hardliner Harmeet Dhillon

One bill that will not be in the law books anytime soon is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which is aimed at combating campus antisemitism. It also requires the Education Department to take the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism into account when determining if an action or practice that violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was motivated by antisemitism.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the act earlier this year, despite concerns on the left that criticism of Israel would be conflated with antisemitism and on the right that the bill had dramatic implications on freedom of speech. There were also tropes from far-right Republicans that the bill would state that Jews killed Jesus.

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has kept the bill off the Senate floor for a vote by attaching it to various other packages that he hopes to push through.

Amid this stalemate, another notable opponent has emerged: Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's choice to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which will play a major role in enforcing federal action combating antisemitism.

Dhillon, one of Trump's top legal minds behind his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, slammed the Antisemitism Awareness Act upon its House passage. "I have been a First Amendment and religious liberties lawyer for minority and majority faith communities for decades and this bill is knee-jerk anti-constitutional dreck," she wrote on X.

She added: "Do better, think harder, and be smarter, Congress. 'Hate speech' laws are a liberal concept." But Dhillon has joined her new colleagues in being a vocal advocate for cracking down on the campus protest movement.

"Sue Yale," she wrote on X in April. "Sue every university that refuses to keep students safe based on their religion. Make them regret their choices. Deplete their endowments. Sue each and every violent protester and organizers. Drain their bank accounts. Sow salt in their career plans."

Dhillon followed that post by laying into a protest at UCLA: "I defend the right of these jackass terrorist apologists to protest, but they do NOT have the right to block access to other students or prevent them from going to class. My tax dollars are subsidizing UCLA and the Regents need to get their act together ASAP or be sued!"

Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary nominee, has also publicly committed to prioritizing the issue, even if the incoming president has vowed to dismantle her department.

"Certainly. I don't think we should have any kind of discrimination anywhere, and I absolutely abhor any kind of violence that we have seen on campus. It should not be allowed," she told Jewish Insider without specifying what plan she supports. "We have lots of priorities that I'm going to be dealing with, and certainly anything that is against the safety and welfare of any of our students will be a priority."

The proposed defunding of the Education Department is perhaps the plank in Project 2025 that most concerns the American-Jewish community. The Office of Civil Rights, which is responsible for investigating and adjudicating allegations of antisemitism, is part of this department and has opened at least 145 investigations into such complaints.

Hardliner Brian Mast

This past summer, a rare coalition of nearly two dozen Jewish organizations across the political and denominational spectrum urged Congress to "provide the highest possible funding" for the Office of Civil Rights, despite the deep disagreements regarding antisemitism on Capitol Hill and in the Jewish world.

House Republicans, though they deemed the office's funding insufficient, voted to cut $10 million more after accusing it of failing to prioritize antisemitism. Several Trump-allied Republicans have also highlighted the office's role in culture war issues like Title IX and what they call "forcing women to compete against males in sports."

Holding a razor-thin majority and already plagued by infighting, the House GOP might find that advancing legislation relating to the Palestinians is the only influential work it can get done in the next session of Congress.

In a surprise development, Rep. Brian Mast has been slated to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee after Trump advocated on his behalf. The Florida congressman has long been considered the U.S. lawmaker most hostile to the Palestinians. He has decried efforts to bolster humanitarian aid for Gaza and dismissed the notion of innocent Palestinian civilians.

"I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term 'innocent Nazi civilians' during World War II. It is not a far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians," he said in remarks that led to an unsuccessful effort in the House to formally rebuke him.

Mast, an evangelical Christian, once volunteered with the Israeli military, and he wore his uniform in Congress in the days after the October 7 attack. That was a way to protest Rep. Rashida Tlaib's placing of a Palestinian flag outside her office.

Mast has also condemned the concept of a two-state solution while spearheading legislation to permanently cut U.S. funding for the UNRWA refugee agency, among other hostile bills. He has also slammed U.S. efforts to secure a cease-fire in Gaza and advocated for expedited and expanded weapons sales to Israel.

[probablyasocialecologist]

WEAPONS USED BY the Israel Defense Forces, security cabinet leaks, and stories about people held hostage by Hamas — these are some of the eight subjects the media are forbidden from reporting in Israel, according to a document obtained by The Intercept. The document, a censorship order issued by the Israeli military to the media as part of its war on Hamas, has not been previously reported. The memo, written in English, was an unusual move for the IDF’s censor, which has been part of the Israel military for more than seven decades. “I haven’t ever seen instructions like this sent from the censor aside from general notices broadly telling outlets to comply, and even then it was only sent to certain people,” said Michael Omer-Man, a former editor-in-chief of the Israel’s +972 Magazine and today the director of research for Israel–Palestine at Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a U.S. advocacy group. Titled “Operation ‘Swords of Iron’ Israeli Chief Censor Directive to the Media,” the order is not dated, but its reference to Operation Swords of Iron — the name of Israel’s current military operation in Gaza — makes clear that it was issued sometime after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The order is signed by the chief censor of the Israel Defense Forces, Brig. Gen. Kobi Mandelblit. (The Israeli Military Censor did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.)

[...]

The order enumerates eight topics the media are forbidden from reporting on without prior approval from the Israeli Military Censor. Some of the topics touch on hot-button political issues in Israel and internationally, such as potentially embarrassing revelations about weapons used by Israel or captured by Hamas, discussions of security cabinet meetings, and the Israeli hostages in Gaza — an issue that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been widely criticized for mishandling. The memo also bans reporting on details of military operations, Israeli intelligence, rocket attacks that hit sensitive locations in Israel, cyberattacks, and visits by senior military officials to the battlefield.

[...]

“In order to get a visa as a journalist, you have to get approval from GPO” — Government Press Office — “and therefore you have to sign a document that says you will comply with the censor,” said Omer-Man. “That in itself is probably against the ethics guidelines at a bunch of papers.” Nonetheless, many journalists do sign the document. While The Associated Press, for instance, didn’t respond to The Intercept’s query about whether it cooperates with the military censor, the news wire has in the past reported on the issue, including admitting that it holds itself to the directive. “The Associated Press has agreed, like other organizations, to abide by the rules of the censor, which is a condition for receiving permission to operate as a media organization in Israel,” the agency wrote in a 2006 story. “Reporters are expected to censor themselves and not report any of the forbidden material.”

[argyrocratie]

"In February, four months after Hamas broke through the fence around the Gaza Strip, Israel’s military establishment secretly employed hundreds of Palestinian workers from the West Bank to repair it. The incident represented one of the only times that Palestinian workers have been allowed to return to work within the Green Line after the Israeli government revoked almost all of their work permits in October.

The Israeli military establishment’s decision to rehire previously-banned Palestinian workers, which bypassed elected lawmakers on the official Security Cabinet, represents a growing tension between Israeli leaders’ divergent approaches to Palestinian laborers.

(...)

In the post-October 7th moment, Israeli leaders are retracing this familiar debate about Palestinian labor, but the rise of the far right has meant that the exclusion pole is much more powerful than in previous iterations. According to Hussain, a 60-year-old Palestinian laborer and West Bank resident who worked in construction near Tel Aviv before October 7th, Israel’s cancellation of almost all work permits has created one of the most dire crises Palestinian workers have ever faced. “The situation was never this bad even during the First or Second Intifada,” Hussain told Jewish Currents, asking that only his first name be used to protect his job prospects. “I have a family of seven and I haven’t worked in five months. I haven’t been able to buy meat since October 7th. We are relying on Allah and no one else.”

(...)

In the first two decades after it occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Israel opted to integrate a Palestinian labor force in the hopes that ensuring a basic level of welfare for Palestinians would maintain calm. But Israel changed tack with the onset of the First Intifada, the late 1980s Palestinian uprising against the occupation. In that period, Israel’s repeated closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which intensified following a wave of Palestinian militant attacks, barred tens of thousands of Palestinians from reaching their workplaces. This created a crisis for employers in the construction sector, where the dependency on Palestinians was most acute, and since Israeli workers were unwilling to work in these hazardous jobs—which also became socially stigmatized due their association with Palestinians—the government had no option left but to bring in workers from elsewhere. As a result, by 1996, the Israeli government had granted 106,000 permits for foreign migrant workers.

The shift to supposedly pliant and depoliticized foreign labor was seen as not only a way to keep the Israeli economy going, but also a strategy to quash the Intifada, which leveraged Israel’s dependency on Palestinian workers to put forward political demands through frequent strikes. “When the working Palestinian population rose up and threatened the interests of the state and employers, migrant workers were brought in as a sort of strike-breaker population,” said activist and anthropologist Matan Kaminer, who researches migrant workers in Israel. Bringing in a non-Palestinian labor force was also seen as preparation for an imminent two-state agreement: “The Oslo years also represented the most significant attempt to wean Israel off Palestinian labor because the government genuinely believed that there would be political separation,” Preminger said.

For right-wing Israelis, however, the potential replacement of Palestinian labor with foreigners triggered other latent anxieties. “The Israeli right was worried about foreign workers because if they were given rights and equality as non-Jews, it could create a liberal society where the first and most important marker is not the fact that you’re Jewish,” said Yael Berda, an academic who studies Israel’s permit regime. Preminger echoed this point: “In Israel, there is a constant negotiation between the inclusionary economic pressure to hire cheap or otherwise exploitable labor, and the exclusionary political pressure of an ethnonationalism that doesn’t want any non-Jews.” To manage this tension, Israel restricted the rights of its new migrant labor force. Even as more than 100,000 foreign workers were brought to Israel by the turn of the millennium, they were not allowed to bring their families. Most came on five-year visas, which gave a clear terminus to their lives in Israel, and there was no route to naturalization. Guaranteeing that migrants’ time in Israel would be finite “ensured that the costs of social reproduction—care of children and the elderly, long-term medical treatment, and so on—were not borne by Israeli society,” Kaminer said, adding that “all these draconian measures were designed very explicitly to ensure that migrant workers don’t become a permanent non-Jewish population.”

Despite these measures, Israeli leaders remained concerned that this population would naturalize, a problem they didn’t have with Palestinian workers. “One of the main advantages [of Palestinian labor] is that Palestinians are part of the economy without being part of the polity, which means you can extract labor without paying the social and political cost of their belonging. At the end of the day, they return to their homes,” said Berda. These concerns, alongside the economic and security benefits Israel enjoyed by hiring subordinated Palestinian workers, eventually led to their return.

For their part, Israeli employers welcomed this shift because, in Preminger’s words, “Palestinians were familiar with the land and the language, and they knew how to do the work, and how to work with Israelis.” Israel also benefited in other ways: As opposed to foreign workers, who send remittances back to their home countries, “Palestinian workers live in a captive market, and all their money ultimately ends up getting recycled into the Israeli economy,” said Abed Dari, a field coordinator with the workers’ rights NGO Kav LaOved. Leila Farsakh, a Palestinian political economist, explained that Israel’s decision to employ Palestinians further consolidated the de-development of the occupied territories, with labor migration to Israel—which accounted for up to one third of the Palestinian workforce during the ’90s—decimating smaller industries in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The higher salaries Palestinian workers were offered in Israel also contributed to pulling them out of agricultural work, facilitating Israel’s land confiscations. “Palestinian labor migration has played a key role in binding and subordinating the Palestinian economy to Israel,” Farsakh explained.

Even more crucially, labor migration became a central pillar in Israel’s regime of control over Palestinians, especially once Israel established its extensive system of work permits in the 1990s and set up a network of checkpoints with which to surveil Palestinian labor after the Second Intifada broke out in 2000. As Berda argued in her book, Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank, the permit regime constitutes “one of the most highly developed systems of control over a civilian population anywhere in the world.” Since a permit can be denied or revoked if the applicant is found to have engaged in any political activity—even peaceful protest—the system has served as a successful deterrent against individual Palestinians’ political participation. The broader closure policy in response to Palestinian uprisings also offered a collective deterrent, what Berda termed “an instrument for managing the political conflict in the labor market.” Following the Second Intifada, Israel also expanded the category of “security threat,” which led the number of Palestinians blacklisted from receiving movement permits to grow from only a few thousand before the Second Intifada to one-fifth of the male Palestinian population by 2007. Those who were denied permits sometimes became Israeli collaborators, which caused widespread suspicion and frayed social bonds within the occupied West Bank—as did the emergence of a class of Palestinian brokers invested in facilitating and managing Israel’s labor regime. These dynamics have continued into the present: As Farsakh noted, “the fact that the West Bank didn’t explode after October 7th is a testament to the success of this pacification policy.”

(...)

In this context, far-right politicians’ hardline rhetoric against Palestinians, and their insistence on bringing in foreign labor, seem likely to result not in a replacement of Palestinian workers but in “a new security regime for managing them,” according to Farsakh. Berda concurred, adding that “the influx of migrant workers will give Israel even more leverage over Palestinian workers, which will mean worse working conditions and more surveillance.” Indeed, the military establishment’s recently proposed pilot for a partial reentry of Palestinian workers explicitly suggests the use of “advanced monitoring systems that have never been used before” as a way to address the far right’s concerns about Palestinian militancy. In crafting this harsher version of the previous system, Israel looks poised to draw from the precedent of both the Intifadas, bringing in a migrant labor population to depress Palestinians’ power as it did in the ’90s while also heightening surveillance on Palestinian workers as in the 2000s. For the Palestinian workers on their receiving end, these emergent re-entry policies constitute a bitter lifeline, offering a short-term improvement on months of unemployment, but a long-term erosion of their already precarious rights."

[odinsblog]

Tonight, CNN has learned that former Hamas hostages had a contentious meeting with Israeli officials today, one of them telling the Israeli security cabinet, quote, “What I see on TV scares me a lot. I see Israeli bombings there, and you have no idea where the captives are. I was in a house surrounded by explosions. We slept in the tunnels, and we feared not Hamas, but that Israel might kill us. And then it would have been, ‘Hamas killed you.’” (source)

[allthegeopolitics]

Al Jazeera, one of the only media outlets broadcasting from the Gaza Strip, can no longer be watched on TV in Israel after the cabinet voted unanimously to close its local offices. It’s the first time Israel has banned a foreign media outlet and marks a new low in relations between the station and the Israeli government. The ban could strain peace talks hosted by Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera. The extraordinary order from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government also allowed it to raid the station’s East Jerusalem office and confiscate broadcast equipment. Following the vote, Netanyahu said in a statement that Al Jazeera reporters had “harmed Israel’s security and incited against soldiers,” decrying the press outlet as a “Hamas mouthpiece.”

Continue Reading.

[sayruq]

[CONT] detector tests.As reported by Israel's Channel 12, Netanyahu said: "All those who participate in cabinet meetings and security meetings must do so, because it is impossible to continue the work as it is now."

The Israeli government continues its slow collapse due to infighting.

[catdotjpeg]

Al Jazeera is reporting from Amman, Jordan, because it has been banned in Israel and the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu does have ultimate control over the cabinet, which has voted to endorse this agreement, and did so even before finishing its meeting in order to allow for that much-awaited statement by US President Joe Biden to proceed. Israel has endorsed the US-brokered ceasefire agreement, and as far as the Israeli media is reporting, the Israeli government says the cessation of hostilities will take effect at 4am local time (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday. What has happened is an agreement – at least the one on paper between Lebanon and Israel – that pretty much repeats UN Security Council Resolution 1701 – it involves the US and France for further monitoring, but there isn’t anything new here. There isn’t anything in this agreement that Lebanon didn’t say it was ready to implement from day one of this war.

-- "Ceasefire with Hezbollah approved ‘but there isn’t anything new here’" by Nour Odeh for Al Jazeera, 26 Nov 2024 21:00 GMT

Israeli air strikes shook Beirut moments after US President Biden said Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to a ceasefire deal. The attacks targeted an apartment in the Khandaq al Ghamiq area of Beirut, reported MTV Lebanon News.

-- "Israel attacks Beirut moments after Biden confirms ceasefire deal" by Farah Najjar, 21:08 GMT