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arms embargo
Israel Bombs Refugee Camps After Inking $5.2 Billion Deal for US F-15 Fighter Jets
"Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party's most devoted constituents wanted to end sales of weapons to Israel, the Biden administration kept sending them."
Nov 07, 2024
The Israeli military on Thursday bombarded refugee camps in northern and central Gaza hours after inking a $5.2 billion deal with the United States to acquire more than two dozen F-15 fighter jets made by the American aerospace giant Boeing.
The agreement, part of a broader military aid package approved by the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress earlier this year, was finalized hours after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to Republican nominee Donald Trump following a campaign in which she resisted calls to support an arms embargo against Israel.
Though Trump at times tried to posture as a pro-peace candidate during the race, he publicly and privately signaled support for Israel's war on Gaza and Lebanon, telling far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a recent call, "Do what you have to do."
Israel's Ministry of Defense called the F-15 deal "a landmark transaction" for fighter jets "equipped with cutting-edge weapons systems." The ministry said deliveries of the aircraft will begin in 2031.
"While focusing on immediate needs for advanced weaponry and ammunition at unprecedented levels, we're simultaneously investing in long-term strategic capabilities," the ministry said. "This F-15 squadron, alongside the third F-35 squadron procured earlier this year, represents a historic enhancement of our air power and strategic reach—capabilities that proved crucial during the current war."
Shortly following the announcement, Israeli forces killed at least 22 people in attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp and Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza—where Israel is engaged in an active campaign of ethnic cleansing—and on the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Palestinian territory.
Norwegian Refugee Council secretary-general Jan Egeland, who traveled to areas of northern and central Gaza this week, said in a statement Thursday that the "complete destruction" he witnessed there was "worse than anything I could imagine as a long-time aid worker."
"What I saw and heard in the north of Gaza was a population pushed beyond breaking point," said Egeland. "Families torn apart, men and boys detained and separated from their loved ones, and families unable to even bury their dead. Some have gone days without food, drinking water is nowhere to be found. It is scene after scene of absolute despair."
"This is in no way a lawful response, a targeted operation of 'self-defense' to dismantle armed groups, or warfare consistent with humanitarian law," he added. "What Israel is doing here, with Western-supplied arms, is rendering a densely populated area uninhabitable for almost two million civilians."
As early as October 2023, NRC warned Israel, UK, US, Germany, & others, that Israeli "relocation orders" for civilian communities were forcible transfers, which under international law constitute an atrocity crime.
Since then there have been more than 60 "relocation orders"
1/2 pic.twitter.com/bsDvWKOqhY
— Jan Egeland (@NRC_Egeland) November 7, 2024
People here have been herded from unsafe location to unsafe location across the Gaza Strip.
They have lost everything, some having been forced to move more than 10 times.
Families I have spoken to here are enduring suffering almost unparalleled anywhere in recent history.
— Jan Egeland (@NRC_Egeland) November 7, 2024
Israel's latest deadly attacks on Gaza came after the conclusion of a U.S. election in which Gaza featured prominently, with Palestinian rights advocates warning that continued American support for Israel's assault would be politically damaging for Democrats—on top of being morally reprehensible and unlawful, given Israel's obstruction of humanitarian aid and repeated targeting of civilians.
New York Times writer Peter Beinart argued in a column Thursday that the election's outcome appeared to show that such concerns were justified.
"Despite overwhelming evidence that the Democratic Party's most devoted constituents wanted to end sales of weapons to Israel, the Biden administration kept sending them, even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel expanded the war into Lebanon," Beinart wrote. "And not only did Ms. Harris not break with Mr. Biden's policy, she went out of her way to make voters who care about Palestinian rights feel unwelcome."
"There is only one path forward," Beinart continued. "Although it will require a fierce intraparty brawl, Democrats—who claim to respect human equality and international law—must begin to align their policies on Israel and Palestine with these broader principles. In this new era, in which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral. It's politically disastrous."
Layla Elabed and Abbas Alawieh, co-founders of the Uncommitted National Movement, said in a statement Wednesday that "while there are many factors at play" in Harris' loss, "one undeniable truth remains: Neglecting the voices of those impacted by war has consequences."
"Today, our message is clear: This moment requires more than resilience; it demands decisive action," said Elabed and Alawieh. "The Biden-Harris administration must put an end to the flow of weapons that fuel this cycle of violence. If they do not, the Democratic Party risks saddling our coalition of voters with the ever-increasing weight of a legacy intertwined with endless war and suffering."
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Not Just Its Neighbors, Israel Makes War on the Entire World
Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point, and U.S. obstruction offers no solution to this crisis—it only fuels it.
Oct 17, 2024
Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.
In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.
In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.
Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.
Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.
This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.
Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.
The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.
Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that "such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated."
Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.
UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.
When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.
Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system.
Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for "perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem" instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.
After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided "any supporting evidence" to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.
Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.
UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”
Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.
Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.
Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.
American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.
The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.
A U.S. arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.
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Swing State Polls Show Harris 'Must Change Course' on Climate and Gaza, Says Sunrise
"The polls we're seeing unfortunately tell the same story we're hearing from the 900,000 young swing state voters we've contacted in the past two months," said one organizer.
Oct 16, 2024
The youth-led climate action group Sunrise Movement said Wednesday that the latest polling numbers in swing states—showing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump leading Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in all but one—demonstrate what they've been hearing in their massive voter mobilization push, and reiterated their demand that Harris course-correct on key issues.
"The polls we're seeing unfortunately tell the same story we're hearing from the 900,000 young swing state voters we've contacted in the past two months," said Stevie O'Hanlon, communications director for Sunrise. "VP Harris is losing ground with young people. To win this election, VP Harris must change course. The campaign urgently needs to work to energize and turn out millions of young voters."
The RealClearPolitics polling average on Wednesday showed Trump pulling ahead in every swing state except Wisconsin, where Harris has 48.3% support compared to Trump's 48%.
Trump is beating Harris by one percentage point in Michigan—the state with the largest share of Arab American voters, where campaigners have been warning for months that Harris' support for continued arms sales to Israel amid its assault on Gaza and Lebanon is a political liability. In Arizona, he is winning by 1.1 points, and in North Carolina by 1.2 points.
"We can look at the math. In every swing state, the number of young voters dwarfs the anticipated margins of victory," said O'Hanlon. "In my home state of Pennsylvania, [President] Joe Biden won the state by 80,000 votes in 2020. More than 80,000 people turn 18 in Pennsylvania and become newly eligible voters each year."
Sunrise has been contacting young voters in swing states since Harris was officially nominated to replace Biden as the Democratic candidate, and in mid-September, the group issued a warning about what they were hearing from voters.
"People are fired up and getting engaged with the election, but there is a sizable number of young people who don't want to get out the vote for Kamala Harris until she backs an arms embargo and puts forward a real climate plan," said Noah Foley-Beining, an organizer with the group, at the time.
A month later, said O'Hanlon, Harris appears to be "splitting hairs for a small fraction of the undecided middle-aged, white, conservative voter base" instead of "electrifying the Democratic base by talking about how she will take on big corporations, tackle the climate crisis, and end U.S. military support for Israel's assault on Gaza."
"VP Harris is losing ground with young people... The campaign urgently needs to work to energize and turn out millions of young voters."
Harris has won applause from progressives for speaking frankly and unequivocally about her support for abortion rights and for unveiling economic justice proposals like a federal ban on food industry price gouging and an expansion of Medicare to cover home healthcare, vision, and hearing care.
But as Israel has expanded its U.S.-backed military operations to Lebanon—killing more than 2,000 people—and cut off northern Gaza from humanitarian aid in what advocates warned appeared to be an ethnic cleansing campaign, the Harris campaign has refused to support an arms embargo on the Middle Eastern country.
Harris has also boasted about the Biden administration's expansion of oil production and her support for fracking.
In an op-ed at Common Dreams on Wednesday, Mitch Jones, managing director of policy and litigation for Food and Water Watch, wrote that the "conventional wisdom" among pundits that politicians must embrace fossil fuels is misinformed, as evidenced by polling in swing states including Pennsylvania.
"A recent survey from the Ohio River Valley Institute showed that 74% of Pennsylvanians support stricter regulations on fracking due to concern about health risks, while 90% or more want expanded setbacks from schools and hospitals, stronger air monitoring, and more rigorous regulation on transportation of fracking waste. Ignoring these concerns and instead framing fracking as a virtue makes little political sense in the Keystone State," wrote Jones.
"Further, in Pennsylvania and beyond, Harris needs a groundswell of support from young and progressive voters—people most likely to care deeply about climate change and preventing it," Jones added. "In a recent survey of young people in swing states from the Environmental Voter Project, 40% said that 'a candidate must prioritize "addressing climate change" or else it is a "deal breaker."' More significantly, 16% said they would definitely not support a candidate that talks about 'increasing U.S. use of fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal,' yet this is exactly what Harris has been bragging about. This election will be decided at the margins, and these are the type of hesitant voters we need to be motivated and engaged to put Harris over the line."
With just 20 days left until Election Day, said O'Hanlon, Sunrise Movement campaigners are "giving everything we've got to contact millions of people and turn out young voters to elect Harris."
"What we're asking," O'Hanlon said, "is that the Harris campaign help us do that."
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