Gaza – lies and ‘spiritual’ cant

A return to America’s proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, in which it seeks to “freeze” the conflict at Europe’s expense – i.e. have the latter’s deeply unpopular comprador leaders cut welfare even further to ramp up “defence” spending in guns not butter style, and so free Washington to focus for the time being ¹ on ‘containing’ the China threat to US rule of the planet – is well overdue.

Genocide in Gaza having quite distracted me. ²

Events permitting, I’ll start that return this week. Meanwhile, with the Guardian reporting an open letter to Sir Keir Starmer from 800 lawyers demanding sanctions on Israel to meet UK obligations under international law, here are two short pieces on Palestine from the many to have caught my eye these past few days.

The first is by Jonathan Cook on but one facet of Israel’s record not only of lying on an industrial scale but of being believed or given benefit of doubt by credulous – if we’re feeling charitable – media. Two days ago in just 592 words he addressed the murderous settler state’s racist claim that Gazans starve because Hamas steals aid. Both the claim, and its widespread acceptance, rely on the toxic orientalism in which we in the West are knowingly or unknowingly steeped.

Israel’s claim that ‘Hamas is stealing aid’ is patently a lie …

Israel’s claim that Hamas is “stealing aid” is so preposterous no serious journalist or politician ought to give it any kind of airing – yet there it is continuously cropping up in the coverage of Gaza.

How do I know Israel’s claim is utterly worthless? For this simple reason:

Israel has a fleet of surveillance drones constantly hovering over the tiny strip of land that is Gaza, monitoring every inch of the territory. The whine you hear every time you watch someone there being interviewed is from one of those drones. They are Israel’s eyes on the enclave. If you are outside in Gaza, you might as well be living in the Truman Show.

Were Hamas stealing aid in Gaza, Israel would easily be able to document it. It would have the video footage from its drones. The fact that it has not provided any footage showing Hamas’ theft of aid – its ransacking of aid trucks, or its fighters smuggling themselves into aid warehouses – is confirmation enough that it has simply invented this claim to rationalise its plans to starve the people of Gaza to death through months of an aid blockade or force them to flee into neighbouring Sinai, whichever comes first.

Without its disinformation campaign about “Hamas stealing aid”, Israel knows popular revulsion to its starvation campaign would grow quickly, and western governments would further struggle to keep opposition in check.

There are lots of others reasons, of course, to reject Israel’s lies about “Hamas stealing aid”. Not least, because every single charity and aid agency dealing with Gaza says that aid is not being stolen by Hamas.

But also because, were Hamas fighters doing so, they would be stealing from their own families: from their children and grandparents, who are much more vulnerable to Israel’s starvation campaign than they are. The idea that Hamas is stealing aid makes sense only to a racist, European colonial mindset in which Hamas fighters are viewed as bogeymen figures indifferent to the deaths of their own children, wives and parents.

What undoubtedly is happening is that Israel is allowing the strongest extended families in Gaza – often crime families with significant private arsenals – to loot the aid. That has become a serious problem since Israel killed off Gaza’s civilian police force (in violation of international law), leaving no one to enforce public order. ³

When everyone’s starving, the most powerful families mobilise their strength to grab an unfair share of the aid. That was an entirely predictable outcome of Israel’s policy to smash all of Gaza’s institutions, including its hospitals, government offices, and police stations, on the bogus pretext that they were “Hamas”.

Note too that Israel has long cultivated close ties to Palestinian crime families, because they provide a potential alternative, and more co-optable, power base to the Palestinian national movements and are a good source of collaborators.

The evidence suggests Israel is encouraging these crime families to loot the aid precisely to justify its dismantling of an existing aid system that works remarkably well, given the catastrophic circumstances in Gaza, and replace it with its own militarised, completely inadequate “aid distribution” system, which is designed only to herd Palestinians into the southern-most tip of Gaza, ready to be expelled into Sinai.

No journalist ought to be repeating Israel’s transparent disinformation. To do so is to collude in the promotion of lies to justify genocide. But the western media class have been doing that now for more than a year and half. They have grown entirely insensible to their own active collusion in the genocide.

*

… if this is the best you can do after a lifetime dedicated to spiritual insight and awakening, what good was any of it? If you can’t even take a solid stance against history’s first live-streamed genocide after decades of spiritual seeking and spiritual finding, then it kinda seems like you’ve been wasting your life this whole time.

The day Jonathan’s piece came out, one by Caitlin Johnstone also got my attention. I usually give all her short posts the two or three minutes they demand, given her peerless ability to confront speciously power-serving narratives in words of withering simplicity. This post was guaranteed to pull me in with its calling out of a “spiritual leader” who can’t see a genocide when it stares him in the face.

Been there. Done it. Got the t-shirt. (Those interested can check out my uncompleted series ⁴ on how I joined a “spiritual” cult.) Meanwhile, over to Caitlin:

If You Don’t Oppose The Gaza Holocaust, You’ve Been Wasting Your Life On This Planet

Take a firm position on the great moral issue of our time, or be prepared to spend the rest of your life explaining why you didn’t.

Screen-grab, May 26: 7-year-old Ward al-Sheikh Khalil tries to flee an inferno after the bombing of a school in Gaza City.

They’re burning kids alive in Gaza. They’re burning them alive. And still people are silent, or are actively supporting Israel, or are spouting mealy-mouthed both-sides gibberish while shrugging their shoulders.

A spiritual teacher who I used to like posted the most obnoxious screed today …

Do check out that “obnoxious screed“, its po-faced angst blown out of the water when we replace Palestinian  with Jew, Israeli  with German, Gaza “conflict” with Nazi holocaust.

A gushing BTL comment applauds the author:

You really are staying neutral and, taking a neutral stance, your stance is as worthy as any I have heard.

Neutral stance? In a genocide? Gosh, how profoundly spiritual!

… babbling about how both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering in this “war” and that, while Israel does have a “right to defend itself”, it’s time for a ceasefire to be reached.

This is a guy who’s made a career out of presenting himself as so wise, insightful and enlightened that people should pay him money to hear what he has to say about life and spiritual attainment, finally deciding to speak out about a genocide that’s been going on for nearly 20 months now, and saying the most vapid, infantile nonsense imaginable. I know teenagers who could’ve done a much better job.

And from where I’m sitting, if this is the best you can do after a lifetime dedicated to spiritual insight and awakening, then what good was any of it? If you can’t even take a solid stance against history’s first live-streamed genocide after decades of spiritual seeking and spiritual finding, then it kinda seems like you’ve been wasting your life this whole time.

No quarrel from me, Caitlin.

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1. I say “for the time being” since no one should be fooled into believing that Trump, who followed Obama in the provoking of Russia which Biden dutifully escalated – and more importantly a US ruling class to which all three answer – have given up on regime change in Moscow. Rather, with diminished resources on the one hand, China growing stronger by the day on the other, the idea is a division of labour whereby Europe picks up the tab not for defeating Russia – can’t be done – but for bogging her down in a ‘frozen’ conflict which, if all goes to plan, can be reheated provided China can be caged this side of WW3. We saw the dress rehearsal in Syria after Russian warplanes stymied regime change in 2015/16. That dirty war was also frozen, and US proxy “rebels” known as ISIS stood down in Idlib pending the ‘breakout’ last December. Conflict ‘freezings’ are for Washington no more than tactical and temporary.
2. See also Jonathan Cook’s piece today, A short guide on how to starve a population to death.
3. A Jerusalem Post opinion piece today – The demonization of Israel in Western media – finds space, in a case of the bully as victim (a textbook ploy of the psychopath) for this:

   Here’s what we do know. We know that the food and humanitarian aid that is regularly being provided has been hijacked by Hamas operatives, who have been selling a 25-kilo sack of flour for NIS 2,000, the equivalent of $560 (that’s NIS 80 or $22 per kilo). For a government that supposedly championed the cause of its victimized people, this takes price gouging to a whole new level.

   Well, you say, at least they back up their claim: more than can be said of others in the piece. But if we follow its sole link we’re taken to a JayPo piece two days ago, i.e. the same day as Jonathan’s:

   

   Were the authors of today’s JayPo piece assuming no one would check that of two days earlier? Rather than bearing out the accusation against Hamas, it vindicates Jonathan’s point. Three remarks. One, the earlier piece speaks of “criminals” rather than Hamas doing the looting. Two, is the later piece seriously suggesting that Hamas, rather than Israel’s brazenly avowed genocide …

   We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. Yoav Gallant, Israeli Defence Minister, Oct 9 2023

   … is responsible for a 25 kilo sack of flour selling for $560? Three, what society in history has not viewed looting, in conditions of starvation and collapse of rule of law, as a crime punishable by summary execution?

4. Call me a faint heart but, after a determined start, both scope-creep and other demands on time and energies saw my interest waning. The final straw fell when I realised that to continue I’d need to re-engage with the teachings of Andrew Cohen by way of books and tapes I’d by this point thrown out. I don’t rule out a return to the project: cults remain of interest for the same reason institutions do; at some level of consciousness we implicitly recognise that the whole wide world is one. Just don’t hold your breath is all.

   The reason I mention this is because just before I ended my short stint under his tutelage this man, who’d (a) claimed to be Enlightened – whatever that means – and (b) that the Enlightened One is incapable of serious error, fully backed the criminal invasion of Iraq. By March 20 2003, when “Shock & Awe” was unleashed on the Iraqi people, I’d already left but was informed by subsequent escapees that he’d told his European and American students that “tonight I stand with my president”.  Say what you like about the bloke – he died in March – his worst enemy couldn’t accuse him of the mealy-mouthed bothsidesism of the guru Caitlin had once admired!