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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-12-06/israel-ai-genocide-program-gaza/

How Israel uses an AI genocide program to obliterate Gaza

According to whistleblowers, Israel’s AI system is generating targets so fast, based on inputs so broad, that everyone in Gaza is in the crosshairs

It should already have been evident from the scale of death and destruction inflicted on Gaza over the past eight weeks that Israel was implementing a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians in the besieged enclave.

Now Israeli whistleblowers have provided details of how these crimes against humanity are being carried out – and how they are being rationalised internally within Israel’s military and political echelons.

An extraordinary series of testimonies jointly published by the Israel-based publications 972 and Local Call last week established that the huge death toll of Palestinian civilians is, in fact, integral to Israel’s war aims, not an unfortunate side effect.

The known dead so far are estimated at almost 16,000, with a further 6,000 missing, presumably crushed under rubble. Two-thirds of those killed by Israel are women and children. 

Two years ago, during an earlier attack on Gaza, Israeli military officials admitted for the first time that a computer was supplying them with potential targets. The intention appears to have been to bypass the restraints imposed by human assessments of likely casualties by outsourcing the killings to a machine. 

The whistleblowers confirm that, given new, generous parameters of who and what can be attacked, the artificial intelligence system, called “Gospel”, is generating lists of targets so rapidly the military cannot keep up.

Israel’s inputs are now so broad that they allow the bombing without warning of high-rise apartment blocks, so long as it can be claimed that one person residing there is believed to have a connection to Hamas. 

As Hamas not only has a military wing but runs the enclave’s government, the new policy potentially widens the circle of targets to include civil servants, police, health workers, educators, journalists and aid workers.

That helps explain how, according to United Nations figures, some 100,000 homes in Gaza have been levelled or made uninhabitable and at least 1.7 million Palestinians displaced, some three-quarters of the enclave’s population.

Basic survival

The revelations definitively give the lie to claims by western politicians, such as US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer, that Israel is simply defending itself and trying to avoid civilian casualties.

In a report last Friday, the Guardian corroborated Israel’s reliance on the Gospel computing system. The paper quoted a former White House official familiar with the Pentagon’s development of autonomous offensive systems as stating that Israel’s no-holds-barred AI war on Gaza was an “important moment”.

The official added: “Other states are going to be watching and learning.”

Perhaps the most significant of the disclosures from current and former Israeli officials who have spoken to 972 and Local Call is the fact that Israel is aware its many thousands of air strikes on Gaza’s residential areas are having a minimal impact on the armed wing of Hamas. 

This contrasts with public declarations that Israel is seeking to eradicate the group. 

Even according to the Israeli military’s own claims, likely based on the new, much broader definition of who counts as a Hamas target, Israel has killed between 1,000 and 3,000 “operatives” – meaning that, even by Israel’s assessment, civilians comprise between 85 and 95 per cent of those dead from its bombing campaigns.

This is not accidental, according to the sources. 

Israel is continuing long-standing military policies towards Gaza – principally the so-called Dahiya doctrine, sometimes known as “mowing the lawn” – but has changed the focus to allow for far greater bloodshed among civilians.

The doctrine, which has guided Israel’s repeated attacks on Gaza over the last 15 years, is named after the destruction of an entire neighbourhood of Beirut in Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006.

The doctrine has two key premises: that laying waste to an enemy area will force the population to concentrate on basic survival rather than resistance; and in the longer term it will encourage ordinary people to rise up against their rulers.

Traditionally, the Dahiya doctrine was chiefly about the destruction of infrastructure. At least officially, given the strictures of international law, Israel claimed it issued advance warnings. That was supposed to give civilians in the targeted area time to evacuate. 

According to military officials, this notice period has largely ended, placing civilians directly in Israel’s crosshairs.

‘Not surgical’

A source explained the effects of the new policy to 972: “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior [Hamas] official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”

A former military intelligence official said the policy was designed to make most of Gaza’s infrastructure legitimate targets: “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not have something of Hamas in it, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise into a target, you will be able to do so.” 

According to these sources, given that Hamas’ armed wing is underground in tunnels, Israel has struggled to identify primary targets, such as weapons sites, armed cells and headquarters. 

Instead, it has focused on what it calls “power targets” – or more accurately, symbolic targets – such as high-rise buildings and residential towers in urban areas, as well as public buildings such as universities, banks, government offices, hospitals and mosques. 

These attacks, say the sources, are seen as a “means that allows damage to civil society”, weakening the ability of the society to organise and function, and families to subsist. According to 972, the former Israeli officials it spoke to “understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks”.

Referring to the high death toll among civilians, another source stated: “Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

Five different sources told 972 that Israel had compiled files on tens of thousands of private homes and apartments in Gaza where low-level Hamas members live. The homes, as well as everyone who lives in them, were viewed as a legitimate target as soon as a Hamas-linked person entered the building.

One noted: “Hamas members who don’t really matter for anything live in homes across Gaza. So they mark the home and bomb the house and kill everyone there.”

Another source observed of this practice that its equivalent would be for Hamas to bomb “all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend.”

An official who had overseen previous attacks on Gaza said Israel would claim one floor in a high-rise was serving as the office of a Hamas or Islamic Jihad spokesman to justify levelling the building. “I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza.” 

If the truth were known about what Israel was doing, the source added, “this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it.”

Another stated that Israel’s aim was to inflict maximum damage rather than hit the part of the building associated with Hamas. “It was also possible to hit that specific target with more accurate weaponry. The bottom line is that they knocked down a high-rise for the sake of knocking down a high-rise.”

Senior Israeli officials have made this goal explicit over the past few weeks. Omer Tishler, the head of the Israeli air force, told military reporters that entire neighbourhoods had been attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner”.

A source said Israel’s long-term aim was “to give the citizens of Gaza the feeling that Hamas is not in control of the situation”.

Holy war

In previous attacks on Gaza, Israel adopted a strategy that inflicted wanton destruction on infrastructure and led to large numbers of Palestinians being killed. But according to the sources quoted by 972 and Local Call, all restraints have been removed, dramatically scaling up the fallout for civilians. 

Tishler, the head of the air force, has confirmed that, in many cases before bombing a building, Israel no longer provides a warning strike with a small shell – known as “roof knocking”. The practice, he said, was “relevant to rounds [of fighting] and not to war.”

The risk this poses to civilians has been highlighted by the disclosure that the Israeli military is now using an artificial intelligence system, Habsora or Gospel, to identify targets.

The very name, with its biblical connotation, confirms the dangerous influences of religious fundamentalism now at play in the Israeli military, and the increasing assumption that Israel is engaged in a holy war against the Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, traditionally seen as a secular figure, has adopted the language of the extremist settler right in calling Israel’s attack on Gaza a war against “Amalek” – a biblical enemy whose men, women and children the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate.

Speaking of the military’s new reliance on Gospel, Aviv Kochavi, the former head of the Israeli military, told the Israeli Ynet website earlier this year: “In the past, we would produce 50 targets in Gaza per year. Now, this machine produces 100 targets a single day, with 50 per cent of them being attacked.”

The goal, he observed, was to address a “problem” in earlier bombing campaigns against Gaza that the Israeli military quickly ran out of Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets its human staff could identify. 

A former intelligence officer told 972 that the Targets Administrative Division that runs Gospel had been turned into a “mass assassination factory”. Tens of thousands of people had been listed as “junior Hamas operatives” and were therefore treated as targets. The officer added that the “emphasis is on quantity and not on quality”. 

A source who worked in the division added that most of Gospel’s recommendations were being nodded through without meaningful scrutiny: “We work quickly and there is no time to delve deep into the target. The view is that we are judged according to how many targets we manage to generate.”

Ethnic cleansing plan

The significance of these revelations – and what they disclose about Israel’s “war aims” – should not be underestimated. 

Previously, the permanent siege on Gaza and Israel’s intermittent rampages based on the Dahiya doctrine were used as tools for managing the enclave. 

They served as a constant reminder to Hamas of who is boss. The goal was to keep the group focused on administrative duties rather than armed resistance: repairing the destruction, devising ways to work around the siege, and restoring Hamas’ political legitimacy with a battle-weary wider public. 

Now, Israel’s aim appears much more comprehensive – and final. According to a report in last week’s Financial Times, Israel is still in the early stages of a campaign that could last up to a year.

Despite the destruction of vast swaths of northern Gaza, and Israel’s current, intensified rampage in the south, an official familiar with the Israel’s war plans told the paper Israel still had a long way to go.

“This will be a very long war… We’re currently not near halfway to achieving our objectives.” 

Most of Gaza’s population is being herded into the Rafah area, pressed up against the short border with Egypt. As has been explained in these pages before, Israel has had a long-term ethnic cleansing plan, seeking to pressure Cairo into rehousing Gaza’s population in Sinai.

The rapid onset of disease and starvation in the enclave from Israel’s intensified siege, denying the population food, water and power, is firmly aimed at forcing Egypt’s hand.

‘Thinning’ the population

According to Israel Hayom, an Israeli paper with historically close links to Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, officials in Washington have been presented with a scheme to weaken Egyptian opposition further. 

The US would offer aid to other neighbouring states conditioned on their accepting refugees from Gaza, thereby lifting some of the burden from Egypt.

Additionally, the paper’s Hebrew edition refers to a plan drafted at Netanyahu’s request by Ron Dermer, one of his senior ministers, to “thin the population in Gaza to the barest minimum possible” through expulsions. The paper refers to this as a “strategic goal” for Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is reported to believe that, after the world has accepted millions of refugees displaced from Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, why should Gaza be different? 

The plan envisions Palestinians leaving Gaza across the border with Egypt or fleeing by boat to Europe and Africa.

Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza, making it uninhabitable, is entirely consistent both with its leaders’ stated aims of treating Palestinians as “human animals” and with the whistleblowers’ revelations. 

And yet western politicians and media continue maintaining the fiction that Israel’s objectives are limited to “eliminating” Hamas – and that the only legitimate question is whether Israel is acting “proportionately”. 

This wholesale failure to see the forest for the trees is not accidental. It is evidence that western elites are wholly complicit in Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. 

However strong the proof, even when insiders disclose Israel’s policies of genocide and mass ethnic cleansing, the West is determined to turn a blind eye.

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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/12/02/the-fools-on-capitol-hill/

The Fools On Capitol Hill

Americans remain largely ignorant about the extent to which foreign influence pervades the United States government, and I am not referring to the fraudulent claims made by Hillary Clinton that Russian has interfered materially in US elections. The real threat comes from elsewhere. Few outside the government itself are likely to be aware of the extent to which the state of Israel and its domestic affiliate-lobby operating out of Washington and New York have corrupted the United States political system, to the point where nurturing and enabling the Jewish state in its ambitions to dominate much of the Middle East has become effectively US policy. As the exchanges surrounding the recent fighting in Gaza, rightly referred to as a war crime and ethnic cleansing, perhaps even the first steps in a planned genocide, demonstrate that even when the US has genuine interests at stake Israel believes itself empowered to say “no” to the president of the United States. The assault on Gaza and the ongoing killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians started again on Friday after a week long pause for hostage/prisoner exchanges. It will continue and Washington is complicit in the deaths as it has politically shielded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government no matter what it does while also arming and funding the Israeli actions.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once said that “We the Jewish people control America.” Indeed, the Israeli dominance of the “fools on the hill” in DC has been carefully contrived, cultivated and sustained. One prime example is the regular rush to the Israeli door whenever Congress is in recess. It is not widely reported how large gaggles of congressmen usually drawn in separate groups from each major party travel to Israel on all expenses paid trips where they are wined and dined and subjected to round after round of presentations that drill into their otherwise empty heads all the virtues of Israel and what it represents. This is propaganda combined with indoctrination at its finest with many “facts” presented by the speakers conveniently fabricated to support Israel’s perpetual victimhood and to hide the fact that Israel is a strategic liability for the US rather than an actual ally or asset. Nor is it a democracy. It is a formula for dissimulation and lying that worked with the Jewish officials in the Pentagon under George W. Bush to provoke a war against Saddam Hussein that killed one million Iraqis and cost the US taxpayer nearly $2 trillion.

The trips to Israel are funded by the “educational” affiliate of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) called the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF). One might reasonably ask why an organization connected to AIPAC, which describes itself on its website as having the “mission” to “…strengthen, protect and promote the US-Israel relationship in ways that enhance the security of the United States and Israel,” should be able to fund the annual mass migration of congress-critters to promote Israeli interests without having to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as an agent of the Jewish state’s government? The answer is actually quite simple. Congress and the Justice Department have been so corrupted by pro-Israel money and other manifestations of Jewish power that they do not enforce the law when it comes to Israel. The venal creatures in Congress are a large part of why that is so.

And the trips are structured in a way that discourages any actual discussions of real issues affecting the two countries. The payoff is exceptional from Israel’s point of view, with the United States serving as, in Netanyahu’s own words, a near unlimited source of money and weapons from a country in thrall, an “America [that] is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction” possessing “an inherently dupable people.”

One particularly tone-deaf recent trip to Israel occurred in 2019. In the wake of two heavily reported mass killings in Dayton and El Paso that were attributed both by the media and the Democrats to “racism” a senior US Congressman led a delegation of 41 of his Democratic Party colleagues plus spouses on a week-long luxury all-expenses-paid trip to Israel, which is one of the few countries in the world that defines its full citizenship as a matter of race and religion and which was at that time as now widely criticized for its human rights record. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland led the annual excursion, having made the pilgrimage to Israel more than fifteen times. “I am pleased to join so many House Democrats in traveling to Israel to reaffirm our support for a critical US ally and to continue learning about the opportunities and the challenges facing Israel and the Middle East,” he said shortly before departing for Tel Aviv.

Other politicians at state levels have followed the federal government lead by making their way to Israel to kiss Benjamin Netanyahu’s ring. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is a presidential aspirant, has gone way overboard in expressing his love for the Jewish state. He transported his whole cabinet to Jerusalem to publicize his legislation to combat what he views as antisemitism and has followed through on that by banning Palestinian student groups at the state universities. He also opposes allowing Palestinian immigrants into the US because they are “antisemites.”

More recently, California governor Gavin Newsom has made the pilgrimage trip and his office has released his comments on just how wonderful Israel is. He wrote his heart out, meaning that the memo is totally phony and contrived bullshit which demonstrates no sympathy at all for the tens of thousands of Palestinian victims: “As I reflect back on the extraordinary people I just met today in Israel, I am reminded of the deep connections between my home state and this country. A country that has faced many dark times before, and certainly is in one now. But amid this present struggle against terrorists are stories of unimaginable heroism — and unspeakable tragedy. I grieved with families in mourning, I met with young soldiers fresh from bomb shelters and battlefields, and I sat with leaders who bear the responsibility of response to it all. Despite the horror, what I saw and heard from the people of Israel was a profound sense of resilience. A commitment to community and common purpose, especially in these most difficult of times. That’s the Israeli spirit. And it’s also the California spirit…”

Republican presidential wannabe Chris Christie has also recently shown up in the Jewish state to kiss the ring and we expect that Nikki Haley will soon arrive bowing and scraping, particularly as it is Jewish money honoring her passion for Israel that is floating her campaign. And there is lots of love even at the bureaucratic level in a number of states to make sure Israel is getting enough American money. In some states including Virginia Israel trade commissions have been funded which have benefited Israeli businesses and investors much more than local workers or companies. In Virginia the commission is staffed by American Jews and Israelis even though it is funded by the state.

The Israeli power over Congress is also reflected in billions of tax dollars that flow from the US Treasury to the Jewish state each year in spite of the fact that Israel is a wealthy country. Also one might consider the White House’s supine behavior vis-a-vis Netanyahu and its large percentage of senior level staff appointments that are given to Jews. Donald Trump gave away the house to Netanyahu by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, approving the annexation of the Golan Heights, and giving the Israeli government a free hand to “deal with” the illegally occupied Palestinian areas on the West Bank and Gaza, which has produced thousands of Arab arrests without trial. Trump’s Ambassador to Israel was his lawyer David Friedman, who spent four years covering for Israel and represented its interests rather than those of the United States. Biden arguably has done even worse by becoming complicit in war crimes by enabling Netanyahu and his band of criminals to perform a developing genocide in Gaza.

One must look at how the power of the Lobby has influenced senior staffing decisions coming from the White House in Israel’s favor because that is where foreign policy is made. President Joe Biden personally considers himself to be a “Zionist.” The president’s Chief of Staff and the State Department’s top three officials have been Zionist Jews. Jews also head Treasury, Homeland Security, the Office of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the National Security Council and the deputy director slot at CIA.

Regarding some other appointments that smell very bad, two recent stories stand out. The first, entitled “Tel Aviv’s Man in Washington”, comes from journalist James Carden. It concerns Amos Hochstein who, has been reportedly tapped as President Joe Biden senior adviser for consultations with top Israeli officials in order to mediate between Israel and Lebanon. Hochstein is an odd choice as he was born and raised in Jerusalem and is a Jewish Israeli-US dual national who served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the early 1990s and who still has a mother and father living in Israel. He moved to Washington after military service and began his unusually rapid ascent to the highest levels of the US government, beginning with a staff position for Jewish Congressman Sam Gejdenson and then as Staff Director of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It is not clear how he obtained a security clearance given his background, but he obviously was given highly sensitive assignments. Carden cites the Lebanese news source L’Orient which reported that Hochstein, as a congressional staffer in the 1990s,” met with an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official to discuss a plan to resettle Palestinians in Iraq in return for sanctions relief.” This background suggests that Hochstein is a bit of a specialist in removing Palestinians from Israel.

After that job, Hochstein joined the Obama administration, eventually being placed in charge of the energy portfolio at the State Department, an astonishing leap in status for a man billed as “Biden’s favorite energy guy” who appears to have no college degree. And what about a biographical sketch that mentions Hochstein’s ownership interests in two Washington restaurants and a movie theater? And then there is his obtaining a well remunerated board seat on the Ukrainian state oil and gas giant Naftogaz, which positively exudes a Hunter Biden odor? And it was reported that early in the Biden administration, Hochstein was the president’s choice to lead efforts to block or destroy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which presumably would have inter alia enhanced his own likely financial interests in Ukrainian energy companies.

Carden also poses the big question, which is “How could someone of Hochstein’s (opaque) background possibly be viewed as an honest broker in the Middle East?” He responds to that himself with “He isn’t” and then goes on to explain “The practice of appointing foreign nationals in sensitive positions of public trust are wildly inappropriate and lead, inevitably, to a subversion of US national interests. As Biden and his staff of bought and paid for political appointees drag us deeper and deeper into two wars 5,000 miles from our shores, the pernicious influence of foreign nationals at the highest levels of the US government is a danger the American people need to awaken to.”

To that expert analysis I would add that naming an Israeli as US-envoy for dealing with a highly manipulative Israel is completely delusional. Hochstein will lean strongly towards benefitting his country, which is Israel, and when it comes to energy there are large gas and oil fields just off the Gazan coast, which would fall into Israeli hands if the Gazans were completely eliminated. The fields are worth many billions of dollars. It will be interesting to watch the development of what Hochstein will contrive to hand them over to his Jewish countrymen while also benefitting his own interests.

The other story is similar in that it illustrates why you should not send Israelis or even American Jews who feel very strongly about Israel to deal with the Israeli government or even anywhere near the Middle East. I say this not to punish them for being Jewish but rather to avoid placing them in situations where there would be a presumption of serious potential conflict of interest. A former senior US official fitting that profile is facing a backlash after being caught on video included on the link repeatedly harassing a halal food vendor in New York and aggressively calling for the deaths of more Gazan children. Stuart Seldowitz previously served as deputy director of the United States Department of State’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs where he must have been quite a lot of fun to be around. How does a man like that get a senior diplomatic post dealing with the Middle East? Well, the only answer must be that he is given the job precisely because he is Jewish and will do the “right thing” for the state of Israel. And you wonder why US foreign policy might be politely described as “completely screwed up”? It did not happen by accident!