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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-11-21/israel-goals-lies-1948-gaza/

Israel and its allies are repurposing the goals and lies of 1948 – in Gaza in 2023

Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Yet, just as happened with the first Nakba in 1948, Israel’s lies and deceptions dominate the West’s media and political narrative

History is repeating itself – and every politician and establishment journalist is pretending they cannot see what is staring them in the face. There is a collective and wilful refusal to join the dots in Gaza, even when they point in one direction only.

There has been a consistent pattern to Israel’s behaviour since its creation 75 years ago – just as there has been a consistent pattern to the “see no evil, hear no evil” response of western powers.

In 1948, in events the Palestinians call their “Nakba”, or Catastrophe, 80 percent of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their lands in what became the self-declared Jewish state of Israel.

As Palestinians maintained at the time – and Israeli historians later confirmed from archival documents – Israel’s leaders lied when they said Palestinians had fled of their own volition, on the orders of neighbouring Arab states.

As the historians also discovered, Israeli leaders lied when they claimed that they had pleaded, first, with the 900,000 Palestinians inside the new state’s borders to stay and, later, with the 750,000 forced into exile to return home. 

Rather, the archives showed that the new Israeli state’s soldiers had carried out terrible massacres to drive out the Palestinian population. The overall ethnic cleansing operation had a name, Plan Dalet. 

Later, Israeli leaders even lied in minimising the number of Palestinian agricultural communities they had destroyed: there were more than 500 wiped from the face of the earth by Israeli bulldozers and army sappers. Paradoxically, this procedure was popularly known by Israelis as “making the desert bloom”.

Extraordinarily, reputable scholars, journalists and politicians in the West – those who dominate the mainstream conversation – ignored all this evidence of Israeli deceit and mendacity for decades, even after Israeli historians and archival documents supported the Palestinian account of the Nakba.

Various strategies were adopted to keep the truth out of view. Prominent observers continued peddling discredited Israeli talking points. Others threw up their hands, arguing that the truth could not be definitively determined. And yet more declared that, even if bad things had happened, there was blame enough to go round on both sides and that, anyway, it was an excellent thing the Jewish people had a sanctuary (even if Palestinians paid the price rather than the antisemites and genocidaires in Europe).

These defences started to crumble with the advent of social media and a digital world in which information could be disseminated more easily. Western elites hurriedly tried to shut down any critical discussion of the circumstances in which the state of Israel was birthed by labelling it as antisemitism.

Ever-shrinking space

All of this is the context for understanding the current “mainstream” debate about what’s happening in Gaza. We are seeing the same disconnect between actual events and the establishment’s crafting of a narrative to excuse Israel, except this time the deception and gaslighting are occurring while we, the audience, can see for ourselves the horrifying facts unfold in real time.

We don’t need historians to tell us what is going on in Gaza. It is live on television (or at least the more sanitised version is).

Let’s just recount the known facts.

Israeli officials have called for the eradication of Gaza as a place where Palestinians can live, and said all Palestinians are viewed as legitimate targets for Israel’s bombs and bullets.

Palestinians have been ordered out of the northern half of Gaza. Israel has attacked Gaza’s hospitals, the last sanctuaries for Palestinians in the north.

Gaza was already one of the most crowded places on Earth. But Palestinians have been forced into the southern half of the strip, where they are being subjected to a “complete siege” that denies them food, water and power. The UN warned last week that Gaza’s civilian population faced the “immediate possibility” of starvation.

Israel has now ordered Palestinians to leave much of the largest city in southern Gaza, Khan Younis. Palestinians are gradually being forced to huddle in the narrow corridor at Rafah, next to the border with Egypt. Some 2.3 million people are being packed into an ever-shrinking space.

The majority have no home to return to, even if Israel lets them head north. The schools, universities, bakeries, mosques and churches are mostly gone. Much of Gaza is a wasteland.  

For years Israel has had a plan to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, across the border, into the Egyptian territory of Sinai.

Media blindness

Even more so than in 1948, what Israel is doing is staring us in the face in real time. And yet, just as in 1948, Israel’s lies and deceptions dominate the West’s media and political narrative.

Israel is openly carrying out ethnic cleansing inside Gaza. Most genocide experts conclude it is carrying out genocide too. The goal in both cases is to cause another Great Ethnic Cleansing, driving Palestinians outside their homeland as happened in 1948 and again in 1967 under cover of war.  

And yet neither of these terms – ethnic cleansing and genocide – are in the “mainstream” coverage of, and commentary about, Israel’s attack on Gaza.

We’re still told that this is about “eradicating” Hamas – something that very obviously cannot be achieved because you can’t eradicate an oppressed people’s determination to resist their oppressor. The more you oppress them, the more resistance you provoke.    

The West is now trying to focus public attention on the “day after”, as though this wasteland can be governed by anyone, let alone the chronically weak, Vichy-style regime known as the Palestinian Authority. 

It is astonishing to see that what was true in 1948 is equally true in 2023. Israel spreads lies and deceit. Western elites repeat those lies. And even when Israel commits crimes against humanity in broad daylight, when it warns in advance of what it is doing, Western establishments still refuse to acknowledge those crimes.

The truth, which should have been obvious long before, in 1948, is that Israel is not a peace-loving, liberal democracy. It is a classic settler colonial state, following in a long “Western” tradition that led to the founding of the United States, Canada and Australia, among others.

Settler colonialism’s mission is always the same: to replace the native population.

A defining moral cause

After its mass ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, Israel tried to manage the remaining Palestinian population through the traditional apartheid model of herding the natives into reservations, as its predecessors did with the remnants of the “locals” who survived their efforts at extermination.

Any caution on Israel’s part derived from the different political climate it had to operate in: international law became more central after World War Two, with clear definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The West wilfully mischaracterises Israel’s process of dispossessing and ghettoising these remaining Palestinians as a “conflict” because they refuse to submit quietly to the apartheid, ghettoisation model.

Now, Israel’s management approach to the Palestinians has broken down completely – for two main reasons.

First, the Palestinians, aided by new technologies that have made it more difficult to keep them out of view, have attracted ever widening popular support – and most problematically, among Western publics.

The Palestinians have also managed to bring their cause to international forums, even gaining recognition as a state by a majority of members of the United Nations. Potentially, they even have redress in the West’s international legal institutions, like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. 

As a result, subduing the Palestinians – or maintaining “calm”, as Western establishments prefer to call it – has become more and more difficult and expensive.

And second, on October 7, Hamas proved that Palestinian resistance cannot be contained even under a siege enforced by drones, and an Iron Dome interception system protecting Israel from retaliatory rockets. In such circumstances, Palestinians have shown they will seek surprising and creative ways to break out of their confinement and bring their oppression into the spotlight.

In fact, given the West’s dulled sensitivities to Palestinian suffering, militant factions are likely to deduce that headline-grabbing atrocities – mirroring Israel’s own historic approach to the Palestinians – are the only way to gain attention.

Israel understands that the Palestinians are going to continue being a thorn in its side, a reminder that Israel is not a normal state. And the struggle to correct Israel’s decades of dispossessing and brutalising Palestinians will become ever more a defining moral cause among Western publics, as the fight against apartheid South Africa once was.

So Israel is taking advantage of this moment to “finish the job”. The final destination is clearly in view, as, in truth, it has been for more than seven decades. The crime is unfolding step by step, the pace quickening. And yet senior politicians and journalists in the West – like their predecessors – continue to be blind to it all.

....

https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/this-is-how-global-government-is

THIS is How Global Government is Run (and What's Coming Next...)

Newsflash: contrary to the worries of conspiracy realists, global government is NOT a far-off, distant threat waiting for us in some potential dystopian future.

No, it's not a future threat. The truth is that global government is already set up and functioning. Here. Now.

In fact, it's not even happening in secret. It's happening in the most visible way possible: a party.

Oops! Did I say "party"? I meant "Conference of the Parties," of course, aka the mechanism by which individual nation-states have been willingly ceding their sovereignty to the globalist technocrats for decades now.

Never heard of "Conference of the Parties," you protest? Of course you have. I talk about the COP of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP pretty much every year. In fact, I've been covering it since at least COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Lest we forget, 2009 was the year EU President (and Bilderberg lackey) Herman von Rompuy declared to be "the first year of global government," specifically citing the COP in Copenhagen as "another step towards the global management of our planet."

Another step, indeed.

Fast forward to 2023. The globalists are fueling up their private jets and chauffered limosines for another wine-and-dine fest—this time COP 28 in Dubai. Yes, it's just a matter of weeks until we get to bear witness to the annual ritual of these would-be global rulers jetting in to lecture us peons about how we're not doing enough to save the planet.

But do you know what a COP really is? And did you know that the UNFCCC's COP is not the only COP being run by the de facto global government? And did you know that the real point of the World Health Organization's (WHO) so-called "pandemic treaty" is to establish yet another COP chamber in this increasingly bloated shadow government?

Get in, buckle up and hold on. You're in for one of the most important lessons of your life.

 

WHAT'S A COP?

Pictured: The COP criminals spring into action.

On one level, the entire concept of a "Conference of the Parties"—or, in globalese, a "COP"—is as simple and straightforward as it is innocuous.

Just ask our <sarc>friends</sarc> over at Climate.gov, who provide this definition for COP in relation to the annual UNFCCC summit:

COP is an international climate meeting held each year by the United Nations. COP is short for "Conference of the Parties," meaning those countries who joined—are "party to," in legal terms—the international treaty called the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Parties to the treaty have committed to take voluntary actions to prevent "dangerous anthropogenic [human-caused] interference with the climate system."

Note how the friendly folks over at Climate.gov (brought to you by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration!) are keen to stress that, under the terms of the UNFCCC, the "parties" are legally committed to take voluntary actions to prevent the sky dragons from torching the planet.

Relax, guys, it's all voluntary*!

*You're just legally obligated to do it.

In fact, you'll note that this strange obligatory/voluntary tension pervades Climate.gov's COP write-up and any number of similar COP explainers.

The parties agree to specific goals for limiting human emissions of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and halogen-containing gases like CFCs) to a specific amount by a given year in the future. Countries participating in the treaty develop their own voluntary pledges—known as Nationally Determined Contributions—to meet the agreed-on targets. Countries are free to develop a mixture of policies that is most economical or advantageous for them. They must report on their successes or failures to meet their voluntary targets at the annual COP meetings.

Hmmm. They "agree to specific goals" but "develop their own voluntary pledges" to meet those targets and they "must" report on their progress toward those "voluntary" targets.

Confused yet? Good. Then the globalists will be happy to hear they're doing their job right.

You see, these technocratic schemers realize that no one is going to bother digging up (let alone actually reading) the Framework Convention on Climate Change itself.

They realize that average people have enough on their plate just working their 9-to-5 and making ends meet, so they're not apt to discover the tyrannical rules their government has legally committed them to under Article 4 of the climate change convention.

And they realize that no one is going to bother to follow the threads and figure out the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change isn't the only supranational, sovereignty-busting, globalist treaty signing entire nations on to the UN Agenda. There's also the Chemical Weapons Convention and the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Stockholm Convention and a bewildering array of such similar international agreements.

And even if the average Joe and Jane did familiarize themselves with all of these various conventions and all of the things that these agreements obligate their nation to do, they wouldn't take the trouble to read the Rules of Procedure dictating how these "Conferences of the Parties" are actually run.

Thus, they'll never read Rule 30 of the UNFCCC COP:

Meetings of the Conference of the Parties shall be held in public, unless the Conference of the Parties decides otherwise.

Or Rule 32:

No one may speak at a meeting of the Conference of the Parties without having previously obtained the permission of the President.

Or Rule 42:

Decisions on matters of substance shall be taken by consensus, except that decisions on financial matters shall be taken by a two-thirds majority vote.

And if, by some minor miracle, they did bone up on the Rules of Procedure for the UNFCCC COP, they'd then find out that they haven't even scratched the surface.

Why?

Because, there's not only a COP for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, there are also individual COPs for the UNFCCC sub-groups, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.

And there's a COP for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

And a COP for the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

And a COP for the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And a COP for the Stockholm Convention and a COP for the Rotterdam Convention and a COP for the Basel Convention and COPs for the Vienna Convention and the Montreal Protocol.

So you see, global government is already here. It is operating through a network of conventions and agreements, obligating governments to act in certain ways and committing them to reaching various targets in a wide variety of fields.

And guess what? As bad as all of this is, it's about to get even worse.

THE WHO: NEW COP ON THE BLOCK

Remember that WHO document popularly referred to as the "pandemic treaty" that I've been ringing the alarm bell about over and over and over and over for the past two years?

Well, it's not called the "pandemic treaty" anymore. It has now transitioned from its previous formal title of a "WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response" to the somewhat less unwieldy "WHO Pandemic Agreement." The latest draft of that agreement was released three weeks ago. Have you read it yet?

If you did read that document, you would have noticed all manner of horrible things hidden deep in that forest of legalese—like, for example, the worryingly woolly language used to describe the "infodemic" problem and the accompanying internet censorship solution that both Tedros and UNESCO are now openly lusting after.

You will also no doubt have noticed something relevant to today's subject buried on page 24:

Oh, of course.

Yes, this is a move straight out of the globalist playbook: distract everyone with the word "treaty" to make them think that this is a document that will require special ratification by their national parliament or congress, and then spring an "agreement" on them that will, in most cases, do a complete end run around the political process. And then, as the coup de grâce, insert an article establishing an entirely new bureaucracy, one that will serve as a de facto arm of global government—one that can then redraft and rewrite the global health rules at will at any time in the future.

It's malevolent. It's dictatorial. It's a travesty. But you have to admit it's brilliant.

Assuming this agreement (or something very much like it) gets the rubber stamp at the 77th World Health Assembly in Geneva next May, most people won't understand what just happened any more than they understood what happened when the UNFCCC established its COP or any of these other globalist institutions first established their respective COPs.

So, for those who can't be bothered to read the WHO Pandemic Agreement (or even just Article 21 of that agreement), here are the lowlights:

1. A Conference of the Parties is hereby established. The Conference of the Parties shall be comprised of delegates representing the Parties to the WHO Pandemic Agreement. Only delegates representing Parties will participate in any of the decision-making of the Conference of the Parties. The Conference of the Parties shall establish the criteria for the participation of observers at its proceedings.

[. . .]

3. The first session of the Conference of the Parties shall be convened by the World Health Organization not later than one year after the entry into force of the WHO Pandemic Agreement.

4. Following the first session of the Conference of the Parties: (a) subsequent regular sessions of the Conference of the Parties shall be held annually.

[. . .]

5. The Conference of the Parties shall adopt by consensus its Rules of Procedure at its first session.

6. The Conference of the Parties shall by consensus adopt financial rules for itself as well as governing the funding of any subsidiary bodies of the Conference of the Parties that are or may be established, as well as financial provisions governing the functioning of the Secretariat. It shall also adopt a biennial budget.

7. The Conference of the Parties shall keep under regular review the implementation of the WHO Pandemic Agreement and take the decisions necessary to promote its effective implementation, and may adopt amendments, annexes and protocols to the WHO Pandemic Agreement.

[. . .]

9. The Conference of the Parties shall establish subsidiary bodies to carry out the work of the Conference of the Parties, as it deems necessary, on terms and modalities to be defined by the Conference of the Parties. Such subsidiary bodies may include, without limitation, an Implementation and Compliance Committee, a panel of experts to provide scientific advice and a WHO PABS System Expert Advisory Group.

There you go. The global government is about to assume jurisdiction over your health. It is in the process of setting up its governing body for drafting up the rules that will control your government's response to the next declared scamdemic. And hardly anyone in the public even knows this is happening.

Any questions?

I thought not.

Of course, some might object: "Don't worry! It says right there in black and white that the rules of procedure and the funding for this body have to be adopted by consensus! You can't even get three of these technocrats to agree on what to eat for lunch, so nothing will ever get decided!"

But if you do raise that objection then it's clear you've never seen what this type of "consensus agreement" looks like in the WHO process. (SPOILER: it involves a confused old man vaguely asking if the committee is ready to approve the draft, looking around the room of half-asleep bureaucrats for ten seconds, declaring that the draft has been approved and then having to repeat his declaration so that the assembled functionaries and gophers know it's their cue to applaud.)

This is how your coming global governmental body will be brought into existence. This is how it will establish its Rules of Procedure (which can be composed of whatever phoney baloney rules they want). This is how it will establish its funding mechanism: in a transparent sham of a parody of the "democracy" that these rulers pretend to hold dear.

THIS IS HOW SOVEREIGNTY ENDS

Cower in fear at your new globalist overlord!!!

"Shut up, conspiracy theorist!" say the professors and the politicians and the obedient establishment toadies in the lapdog press when confronted with the argument laid out in this editorial. "This COP business isn't global government and it isn't nefarious. After all, your governments have voluntarily committed themselves to these agreements and thus to be bound by whatever decisions the COPs make!"

Hard to argue with that, isn't it?

Unless, of course, we understand that our governments' arbitrary enactment of rules and restrictions without our consent is precisely the problem.

First, our (s)elected representatives sign us up to overarching, unaccountable, international bodies like the UN and the WHO. Then they appointed nameless/faceless bureaucrats to act as our unelected representatives at those bodies that sign us up to conventions and agreements that most of us don't even know exist. These conventions and agreements then "obligate" our national governments to take certain actions or to refrain from certain other actions. Finally, those same governments pass legislation that makes these pledges and targets and restrictions the law of our land.

But all this is "voluntary," you see? It's all above board. There's no global government—only global conventions that parties have agreed to abide by.

And to rub even more salt in the wound, those same fact checkers who would deny that this web of conventions and agreements in fact constitutes a de facto global government will also tell us that these agreements don't go far enough in removing any pretense of national sovereignty from the international system.

Just ask Mostafa El-Harazi and Noor Irshaidat. They are the two Carey School of Law juris doctor students who penned an op-ed for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy last year, in which they lamented: "What is notably missing [from the UNFCCC], however, is an ‘enforcement mechanism;’ a provision to explicitly deter state parties to the UNFCCC from noncompliance through fines or jurisdiction to an international court like the International Court of Justice."

Or ask the boffins over at ScienceDirect, who, in their overview of the UNFCCC, bemoan its toothlessness: "[T]he UNFCCC contains few specific requirements and, notably, no enforceable requirement for signatories to reduce the emission of GHGs."

Or ask boffins like Robert Keohane and David Victor, whose 2016 Nature article on "Cooperation and discord in global climate policy" asserts, "Effective mitigation of climate change will require deep international cooperation, which is much more difficult to organize than the shallow coordination observed so far."

But, as I say, not one person in a thousand even knows about the Framework Convention on Climate Change or the Basel Convention or the proposed WHO COP, and not one person in a million knows what any of these bodies "voluntarily" obligate the member parties to do.

Would you prefer to watch the sportsball game or read a hundred-page document of complicated legal jargon? Would you rather go out for a night on the town with your friends or commit to studying the organizational chart of some obscure arm of the UN bureacuracy?

Exactly. As I've had cause to note before, The End of the World Will Bore You to Tears.

So, if we perish from lack of knowledge, then how do we thrive?

By learning more about these instruments of control, that's how.

Specifically, we can counteract the globalist agenda by learning more about the treaties and agreements and conventions that are increasingly governing our lives. Then we can parlay our knowledge into a movement. We'll know we're making progress when the drive to exit the WHO (and exit the UN while we're at it) become the only political issues that people are interested in talking about. And we'll know we've really been successful when those same people start talking about individual sovereignty and our natural right to withdraw from every governmental system of control.

Sisyphus, meet rock. Happy rolling!