Netanyahu Has An ALL NEW FOE Coming For Him!

Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has an all new enemy and I phrase it that way intentionally, because this is less an attack on Israel in this instance, more a specific attack on him, less a military foe, more a personal one, because one of his biggest critics for the longest time, now appears to have ramped things a notch up with a decisive attack on him personally and where they’ve maybe skirted the lines of this before, by attacking his actions, this time it’s all on him. The ‘enemy’ inverted commas I’s I’ve put it, is Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz who have I would argue gone above and beyond anything they’ve said previously, because in the last few days not only have Haaretz published articles broadly in agreement with international consensus that what Israel is doing is now a genocide – this is an Israeli paper now saying this – but has also now directly accused Netanyahu of carrying out ethnic cleansing. Netanyahu has threatened to shut this newspaper down before because of their critical coverage, now they have directly accused their own country’s Prime Minister of carrying out wear crimes, not only a massive assault in the media on Netanyahu as this is personally, a direct attack, an accusation, but also shames all other media still fawning over him, particularly in other countries. If an Israeli paper can call him a war criminal, then why can’t they?
Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu’s newest enemy is a newspaper, functionally moving up from being just critical of his actions as Haaretz have been for quite some time now, certainly are not Netanyahu’s biggest fans at all, some of his most vocal critics in fact, but now they have directly accused him of committing ethnic cleansing, certainly not something new to all of us who have been paying attention to the realities of the Israeli atrocities being committed in the Middle East, but an Israeli newspaper is now also saying it in straightforward no holds barred form and that is huge, that is a big shift and they did so in an editorial at that, so speaking on behalf of the newspaper itself.
Now some might be listening to this and thinking Damo, this genocide has been going on for more than a year now, where has Haaretz been all that time? And I’d say yeah, fair point, we’ve seen Israel raze the Gaza Strip from one end to the other, then go back over the same ground doing it again, all whilst attacking Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Iran all at the same time, where has Haaretz been all this time and functionally they’ve pushed the boundaries only so far, they’ve criticised Netanyahu’s decisions, the damage, the death, the destruction of lives and livelihoods to a point they’ve been threatened with a shutdown, and we’ve seen Israel carry such shutdowns out already, they’ve banned Al Jazeera from reporting from Israel for months now, because of the truth they tell and the censorship Israel wishes to have in place, cover from all journalists to stop them reporting on what they are doing, the war crimes they are committing and Haaretz have drawn up short of crossing a line there, but perhaps their latest editorial marks a shift and lets face it, does Netanyahu actually dare shut down one of his nations biggest news outlets? It’s one thing to ban Qatar based Al Jazeera, it’s quite another to ban an Israeli paper calling him out and calling him a war criminal because by telling the world as Haaretz has done, that what he is ordering happen in Gaza is now ethnic cleansing, not might be, not could be, not allegedly, but is ethnic cleansing, it does have a ring of’ enough is enough come get us’ about it from Haaretz.
So what’s triggered the shift given everything that has already been witnessed in Gaza then? The annexation of northern Gaza appears to be the straw that has broken the camels back and the blame for that is very much directly aimed at Netanyahu in Haaretz’s piece titled ‘Netanyahu's Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza Is on Display for All to See.’
Here's a damning excerpt from it, from the very start of the article:
‘The Israeli military is conducting an ethnic cleansing operation in the northern Gaza Strip. The few Palestinians remaining in the area are being forcibly evacuated, homes and infrastructure have been destroyed, and wide roads in the area are being built and completing the separation of the communities in the northern Strip from the center of Gaza City. "The area looks like it was hit by a natural disaster," Haaretz military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich concluded after a tour with Israeli forces there last week.
What Kubovich saw, however, was not a natural disaster but rather a premeditated act of human destruction. A senior IDF officer, identified by London's The Guardian newspaper as Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, the commander of the 162nd Division, explained to reporters: "There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes."
The officer said the vast majority of residents of the area's communities (Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Al-Attatra, Jabalya) have already evacuated. "We received very clear orders," the officer said. "My task is to create a cleansed space. … We are moving the population for its protection, in order to create freedom of action for our forces."’
Cleansed space, moving a population of which 70% of whom that have been killed having been women and children shows what Israeli protection is worth and the clearing or areas, notably that of Jabalia, a literal refugee camp, makes that even harder to swallow. We also know that Israel’s claims to have cleared the area of civilians has been achieved by simply designated everybody still there as active combatants.
The soldiers there committing this act of ethnic cleansing, were asked if they were enacting the now infamous General’s Plan, which included ethnic cleansing, the splitting up of the Gaza Strip, of the population being housed in designated areas little different from refugee camps, complete with mercenary guards already hired to guard them, while other pockets of Gaza get carved up for Israeli occupation and settlement. The soldiers claimed to have no idea what this was, that they were simply following orders. Where have we heard before? Following instruction given by the IDF’s Southern Command and chief of staff.
Yet despite that the commander being interviewed by Yaniv Kubovich reiterated how Israel’s IDF is the most moral army, the most ethical army, in allowing people to move south where there is they claim water, food and medicine, which absolutely is not being allowed into the north, where ethnic cleanisng and war crimes are being committed and where every human being, be they man or woman, old or young, is now Hamas, is now a legitimate target and those being moved south of course will never be allowed back north again.
Where it is easy to hide behind a label such as the General’s Plan, Haaretz is not doing that and they point this out in their article, that that ideal of General Giora Eiland’s may have been the way this plan was sold to the public, but the implementation of it is on the commanders of today, the ones issuing the orders these soldiers in northern Gaza are following, the chief of staff of the IDF being Herzi Halevi and the Southern Commander Maj. Gen Yaron Finkelman, named and shamed as they should be, but Haaretz doesn’t leave it hanging on them, because they shoot right for the top, since these commanders are ultimately subordinate to their political leaders and so Haaretz suggests calling such moves the General’s Plan should stop and they should instead be called Netanyahu’s Orders. It is his Total Victory he is chasing, it is his War of Rebirth that is seeing ethnic cleansing happening in Gaza and it is utterly damning that this narrative is coming from an Israeli paper.
Another Haaretz piece from today, is asking not if Israel is committing genocide, but how it is committing genocide. It has looked at Article 2 of the genocide Convention, which lists the five criteria that define genocide and looks in turn at each to see how Israel is committing it, these being:
‘(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
According to Haaretz, Israel have committed four of these.
We know they have killed members of the group, Palestinian people, 43,000 the official figure but we know it’s likely closer to 4 times that.
Caused serious bodily or mental harm. Of course they have, the official figures in excess of 100,000 so affected, again in actuality likely far higher. Deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about destruction. Turning off the water, the power, stopping food from entering, barring humanitarian aid, we know all this has been done too and is still happening unabated. Imposing measures to prevent births, well look at the deliberate targeting of hospitals of delivery rooms, maternity wards, neonatal units, it has all happened and then some. The only aspect of Article 2 that Haaretz couldn’t attach to Netanyahu’s Orders was forcibly transferring children of the group to another group, because frankly that would have been a mercy. Instead far too many children have just been killed. It just takes one criteria to be met to constitute a genocide. Israel have met 4 and that has evidenced and damned by one of their own newspapers. Where independent media holds Israel to account, where many foreign major outlets hold them to account and where Western mainstream and politicians utterly fail to hold Israel account, now one of their newspapers has done so in the most excoriating and damning fashion and I could go on because they have set about in the last few days really taking on Netanyahu personally, just yesterday another piece was published by Haaretz, another editorial as it happens, titled: ‘Netanyahu's Office's Alleged Crimes Could Rival Those of a Mafia’ covering three criminal offences committed from within his own offices.
Haaretz is tearing Netanyahu apart on a daily basis right now, as good a job of holding genocide to account as any and it is their own leader they are holding accountable, holding power to account as all journalists should, but in Israel, with Netanyahu being how he is, how long will he put up with these attacks from his new enemy from within? He’s threatened to shut them down before, they really do look now to be daring him to follow through and what a message that would send to the world.
Of course it is not just in Israel that Netanyahu’s Orders are being carried out, the sheer level of staggering violence being committe4d against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon has seen them attacked every single day for the whole of October and in years to come the documentary reports published almost daily by those peacekeepers in UNIFIL will read like a war diary in the history books. Check out that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.