#Jonathan Cook

[bakrishna]

[nicoledrewingle]

It’s been 379 days since i saw FTSK live :,)<3

[crunkboy]

[X]

[withbriefthanksgiving]

Article dated 15 November 2023

The White House faces a dilemma. It has the power to stop the death and destruction in Gaza in its tracks, at any time of its choosing. But it chooses not to. The US is determined to back its client state to the hilt, giving Israel licence to wreck the tiny coastal enclave, seemingly whatever the cost in Palestinian lives. But the optics - and that is all that concerns Washington - are disastrous. TV images have shown hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their destroyed homes, on a scale unseen since Israel’s earlier mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967. [...]

But what the Biden administration really needs is a cover story to justify the fact that it is continuing to supply the weapons and funding needed by Israel to carry out its crimes in broad daylight.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken set out his stall last week at the G7 summit. The goal is to shift the focus away from Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, and Washington’s backing for them, to a purely theoretical discussion about what might happen after the fighting ends.

Outlining his post-war “vision” for Gaza, Blinken said: “It’s also clear that Israel cannot occupy Gaza. Now, the reality is that there may be a need for some transition period at the end of the conflict… We don’t see a reoccupation and what I’ve heard from Israeli leaders is that they have no intent to reoccupy Gaza.” James Cleverley, Britain’s former foreign secretary, echoed his US counterpart, insisting power would in Gaza be handed to “a peace-loving Palestinian leadership”. Both appear to favour the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas taking over Gaza - or what’s left of it.

This bad-faith manoeuvre is off the charts, even by the pair’s usual mendacious standards. Both the US and Britain want us to believe, at least while Palestinians are being massacred day after day, that they are serious about reviving the long-cold cadaver of the two-state solution.

The first glaring deception is Washington’s insistence that Israel avoid “reoccupying” Gaza. Blinken wants us to believe that the strip’s occupation ended long ago, when Israel dismantled its Jewish colonies in 2005 and pulled out the soldiers who protected the settlers. But if Gaza was not actually occupied before Israel’s current ground invasion, how does Washington explain the Israeli blockade of the tiny enclave for the past 16 years? How did Israel manage to seal off Gaza’s land borders, block access to Gaza’s territorial waters, and patrol Gaza’s skies 24/7? The reality is that Gaza has not experienced a day free of Israeli occupation since 1967. All that Israel did 18 years ago when it pulled out its Jewish settlers, was to run the occupation more remotely, exploiting new developments in weapons and surveillance technologies. Israel developed and refined a very sophisticated, arm’s length occupation, using Israeli teenagers with joysticks at distant sites to play God with the lives of 2.3 million imprisoned Palestinians. Israel is not in danger of “reoccupying” Gaza. It never stopped occupying it.

Another deceit is the impression Blinken is intentionally creating that the US is preparing for a confrontation with Israel over Gaza’s future. [...] But the suggestion that Israel and Washington are not on the same page is pure trickery. The “row” is entirely confected, designed to make it look like the Biden administration, in pushing for negotiations, is taking the Palestinians’ side against Israel. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pretence is a boon to both sides. The US wants to look like one day - after all Gaza’s homes are destroyed and its people ethnically cleansed - it will drag Netanyahu to the negotiating table kicking and screaming. An embattled Netanyahu, meanwhile, is able to score popularity points with the Israeli right by posturing defiantly against the Biden administration. It is pure theatre. The confrontation will never materialise. The US “vision” is nothing more than make-believe.

The truth is that Washington formally abandoned the so-called two-state solution years ago, aware that Israel would never allow even the most circumscribed of Palestinian states. Over the past three decades, Israel has gone from the pretence - maintained during the Oslo process - that it might one day concede a sham, demilitarised Palestinian state, cut off from the rest of the Middle East, to outright rejection of Palestinian statehood on any terms at all. Back in July, before Hamas’ 7 October attack, Netanyahu was widely reported to have told a closed Israeli parliamentary meeting that Palestinian hopes of a sovereign state “must be eliminated”. Will the same Israel that refused to countenance a state under Abbas, the Palestinian leader who called security coordination with Israel “sacred”, really be ready to hand over the keys to the kingdom after its latest rampage? [...]

The Biden administration can pretend to be resurrecting a non-existent two-state solution. But the reality is that Israel has had just such an expulsion plan - called the Greater Gaza Plan - on the drawing board for decades. According to reports, Washington has been signed up to the creation of a Palestinian enclave in Sinai since at least 2007.

Assuming anything of Gaza survives the current onslaught, Blinken’s next deceit is the suggestion that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are able or willing to take Hamas’ place. There is, of course, the small matter of how Abbas could rule a population with which he has so discredited himself in the past by endlessly accommodating Israel’s crimes. After all, his Fatah party was ousted from Gaza in 2006 after it was defeated in Palestinian legislative elections. But Abbas is losing even more credibility with Palestinians as he sits passively through the horrors unfolding in Gaza. As former British ambassador Craig Murray has noted, with Palestine a member of the UN, Abbas could invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel. That, in turn, would require a ruling from the International Court of Justice. It would put Israel, the US and the UK firmly on the back foot. But Abbas has once again sacrificed his people to avoid angering the US. Even more preposterous is the idea that Israel would ever let the Palestinian Authority rule Gaza when that same PA is not allowed to be in charge of the West Bank. Abbas has no control of any kind over the 62 per cent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed - temporarily - under full Israeli rule, enforced by the Israeli army and Jewish settler militias. What was intended by Oslo to be temporary was long ago made permanent by Israel. [...] Abbas has no more than a police force in these cities, one that acts as a local security contractor for the Israeli military. When the Israeli army decides to do the job itself, and bursts into a West Bank city unannounced, Abbas’ forces shrink into the shadows.

But perhaps the most fraudulent of the White House deceptions is the assumption that Hamas - and by extension, all Palestinian resistance - can be eradicated from Gaza. Palestinian fighters are not some alien force that invaded the enclave. They are not occupiers, even though that is the way they are portrayed by every western government and media outlet. They emerged organically out of a population that has endured decades of military abuse and oppression from Israel. Hamas is the legacy of that suffering.

Israel’s genocidal policies - unless it intends to wipe out every Palestinian in Gaza - will not moderate that impulse for resistance. Israel will simply inflame more anger and resentment, and a stronger motive for vengeance. Even were Hamas to be wiped out, another, probably more desperate and vicious resistance group would surface to take its place. Most of the Palestinian children now being bombed and terrorized, made homeless along with their families, and witnessing loved ones being killed, will not grow up over the next few years to become young peace ambassadors. Their birthright will be the gun and the rocket. Their ambition will be to avenge their families and restore their honour.

Israel and the US know all this, too. History is crammed full of such lessons taught to greedy, arrogant colonisers and occupiers. But their goal, whatever they claim, is not a solution or a resolution. It is permanent war. It is perpetuating the “cycle of violence”. It is greasing the tank treads of the West’s profitable war machine by spawning the very enemies that western publics are told they need protecting from.

Whether Palestinians are returned to the Stone Age in Gaza, as Israeli military commanders have long desired, or expelled to live in refugee camps in Sinai, they will not accept a fate in which they are treated as “human animals”. Their fight will go on. And Israel and Washington will have to keep inventing new, ever more fanciful stories to try to persuade us that the West’s hands are clean.

[thatstormygeek]

The students have been trying to change the national conversation in ways that will pressure Biden to stop his all-too-visible law-breaking.  But they have run up against the usual problem: the national conversation is largely dictated by the political and media class in their own interests. And they are all for the genocide continuing, it seems, whatever the law says. Which means the media has carefully refocused attention, dealing exclusively with the nature of the protests – and a supposed threat they pose to "order" – not addressing what the protests are actually about.  

The coverage had to studiously ignore the fact that a sizeable chunk of those protesting on campus were Jewish.  The media’s manufactured narrative was then put to further, mischievous purpose. Zionist Jews on campus – those who identify with Israel rather than the global movement to stop a genocide – were reported to be uncomfortable when faced by the protests. Or "unsafe", as the media preferred to call it.  In all this hysteria, no one seemed to care how “unsafe” anti-Zionist Jewish students felt, or Palestinian and Muslim students, after being publicly labelled antisemitic and a threat to “order” by Congress and their own president.  ... The investment by the media in shocked outrage on behalf of one student – who, even in her own assessment, says the worst injury she suffered was a headache – over one unremarkable confrontation at one of the many dozens of campus protests in the US is the real story.  Had the media industry even a tiny conscience, the journalists lavishing concern on a Yale student with a headache might pause to wonder if some of that concern ought to be redirected elsewhere – as the campus protests demand. Such as towards the tens of thousands of children being killed by US bombs and starved with the help of a US funding blockade on the UN’s main relief agency, Unrwa. Or towards Israel’s destruction of every one of Gaza’s 12 universities.  

The reality the political and media class are working to obscure is that some universities, rather than calling the police, have been allowing the protests on their campuses to play out peacefully.  And – in what seems to be the real fear among the political and media class – the protesters are also slowly having some impact in isolating Israel as well as moving public opinion. Extraordinarily, given the uniformly hostile coverage of the protests, suggesting they are antisemitic, four in ten American voters have still concluded that Israel is committing genocide, according to a survey published this week.  ... Concessions that ended protests at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey, have included holding talks with student representatives about investments in arms firms assisting Israel's slaughter in Gaza, the setting up of a Palestine studies course mirroring an existing Jewish studies programme, and establishing a long-term collaboration with a Palestinian university in the West Bank similar to Rutgers’ relationship with Tel Aviv university in Israel. Those minimal concessions have already provoked a furious backlash from 700-plus members of the local Jewish community. They accused Rutgers of “capitulating to the extreme demands of the lawless mob”, one that is supposedly inciting “hatred and violence against Jews and the Jewish state”.  The group has threatened to bring the university to its knees by pulling “donations and financial support”. Meanwhile, the four largest Jewish federations in New Jersey are reported to be demanding a state investigation of Rutgers. ... Over the past seven months, the western media have erased the context of decades of Israeli structural violence: its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian communities to establish in their place illegal settlements of armed Jewish militias. Even more specifically, they have disappeared the imprisonment and slow-motion starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians through a 17-year medieval-style siege of Gaza.  Instead, Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October is presented as coming out of the blue – that clear blue sky. It has served as a rationalisation for genocide by Israel that just keeps on giving. 

[puttingwingsonwords]

Dracula scrambling around the castle pretending to be his own servants is so important in showing that aside from being a super powerful evil vampire-sorcerer he is also a huge loser

[aussyartz]

The Archifish

it took me entirely too long to do all those eyes enjoy !!

[hell0jon]

“First one to leave has to read the next statement”

It’s been 48 hours

[orbch]

manic pixie dream girl

maniacal demon nightmare twink

[forgetmesoup]

BEHOLD MY JONS

[bakrishna]

[wszczebrzyszynie]

some of my favourites i drew while listening to season 5

[altades]

You were never more then what we needed you to be

/sounds of a man getting beaten by a pipe in the background/

[itsmeimcathy]

Rare footage of dracula trying to make his good friend jonathan's stay at the castle as normal as possible:

[thatstormygeek]

Nemes’ statement, published sympathetically by establishment media outlets, turns the world on its head in accepting the gravest atrocities in living memory only because they are being committed by Israel – a militarised, settler colonial state that claims to represent Jews around the world and was founded, with western backing, on the ruins of the Palestinian people’s homeland. A state that has been ethnically cleansing Palestinians for eight decades and is now declared by the international human rights community to be an apartheid state. A state that the World Court has ruled is committing a plausible genocide, and is known to have killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and created famine conditions for some 2 million more. All of this, according to Nemes, is evidence not that Israel has turned out to be a classic example of the abused turning abuser but of a continuing global plot supposedly against the Jewish people, one that threatens their existence more so even than the Nazi Holocaust.

It is, says Nemes, Zionist Jews like himself who are the true victims of Israel’s killing spree in Gaza – not the Palestinians being turned skeletal by a famine induced by the state Nemes identifies with, or the Palestinian bodies blown apart by bombs dropped by the state Nemes says represents him. It is, Nemes claims, Israel and the Zionist Jews who excuse its every action who are friendless, isolated, vulnerable, even as the United States – the world’s global hegemon – provides a constant flow of bombs to Israel and untold billions in financial aid, and even as Washington and Europe freeze funding to UNRWA, the only United Nations body capable of keeping the famine in Gaza at bay.

Nemes ends with a warning as divorced from reality as the rest of his screed. We are, he says, “reaching pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Jewish hatred”, in what he describes bafflingly as a “trendy, ‘progressive’ way”. So presumably in Nemes’ mind, the threat of antisemitism is not posed by the far-right racists stalking the corridors of power, like Donald Trump or Hungary’s own Viktor Orban, or the white nationalists who see Israel as a model for their own ethnic supremacist states that will demand Jews be exiled from the West to a Jewish ghetto in the Middle East. No, Nemes is worried about those “progressives” who want equality for Palestinians and Jews, who want an end to Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians.

[melandrops]

jon sims being an exceptional cook but also thinking that three meals a day are optional for him was one of the best collective headcanons we came up with good work everyone