Yves here. The idea that the continued extermination in Gaza will generate more terrorism in the West seems entirely logical. I’m actually surprised we have not seen more given that the vividness and level of horror has only increased, along with the frequency of Zionist celebrations of cruelty.
However, this post oddly does not contemplate what would follow.
In the US, given the conflation of criticism of Israel, even by Jewi, with anti-Semitism, terrorism will similarly be conflated with criticism, as in if you engage in the latter, you are promoting the former. So expect more concerted efforts to round up Muslims and boot them out of the US, particularly students. The Trump Administration would if it could set up internment camps for Muslim citizens a la the treatment of the Japanese in World War II. The Trump Administration would similarly use any rise in violence that could be depicted as related to Israel to further clamp down on free speech, engage in intrusive searches, and intimidate journalists. The FBI has taken to showing up a journalists’ doors without a warrant. In this case, the suspect in the Israeli embassy shootings, Elias Rodriguez, was already in custody, so it’s not as if the FBI needed information urgently so as to bring him in.
An additional point is that there is a real possibility of a false flag operation to justify US support of an Israeli attack on Iran. Mind you, expert commentators like Larry Wilkerson have raised this as a possibility, particularly in light of the fact that Israel has strike packages ready to go and is being restrained by Trump, who recognizes that war with Iran would be a seriously bad idea.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers.Originally published at openDemocracy
Conditions for Palestinians are getting progressively worse as Israel’s effort to control Gaza intensifies. Aware that his war can continue only as long as he has the backing of a highly unpredictable US president, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is ramping up efforts to bring the territory under total control as quickly as possible, whatever the human cost.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population of more than two million are now being forced into three small areas, where the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is imposing tight security and limiting the flow of desperately needed food, fuel, medical supplies, and water.
In this context, the murder of two young Israeli Embassy staff, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum last week is especially significant.
Despite the best efforts of the Israeli government’s well-resourced public relations system, Israel has steadily decayed into pariah status across the world as its war on Gaza has intensified. That status will persist until the bombing and killing of Gazans stops, and given the sheer intensity of the current attacks, it will probably grow. Does that mean the Washington attack is a sign of things to come?
We have been here before, especially in the decade after 9/11, when the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sparked scores of attacks on Western targets.
Take, for example, the 7/7 train and bus bombings in London that killed 56 people in July 2005. At the time, prime minister Tony Blair’s government was utterly insistent that the attack had nothing to do with the UK’s involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, a stance undermined when it was revealed that one of the bombers had said precisely the opposite in a video recorded before the attacks.
Other attacks carried out in protest of the US-led Western ‘war on terror’ include the bombings of trains in and near Madrid’s Atocha rail terminus in March 2004, killing 191 people, and the targeting of two nightclubs and the US embassy in Bali in October 2002, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Another such attack killed more than 50 people at two synagogues and the British Consulate in Istanbul in 2003, while another targeted US-owned hotels in Jordan’s capital of Amman, killing 60. Similarly, 55 people died when the Marriott hotel in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad was bombed in 2008; German tourists lost their lives when a historic synagogue was bombed in Tunisia in 2022; and holiday resorts frequented by Israelis in Egypt and Kenya were attacked in the mid-2000s.
Few if any of the attacks were organised solely by al-Qaida from Afghanistan or Pakistan. Many were organised locally, albeit sometimes involving connections to and no doubt inspiration from al-Qaida.
There was something of a pause on these attacks as the Iraq War eased in the early 2010s, but they resumed amid the four-year US-led air war on ISIS from 2014.
To name just a few of the attacks that took place, mostly across Europe, in the mid-2010s, 130 people lost their lives in a series of coordinated bombings across Paris in November 2015; the following year, a truck was used to kill 86 people and injure hundreds in a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, in the south of France, and 12 died in a similar attack on a Christmas market in Berlin.
So far, there is little direct comparison between these many attacks over two decades and what is happening now in relation to Gaza, but that might be about to change.
This week has seen the start of the US-organised distribution of food in Gaza through the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is run in close association with the IDF and intended to replace the hugely experienced UN organisations that have been distributing aid for decades.
The GHF, a US-backed organisation that was founded in Delaware in February but is based in Geneva, Switzerland, is establishing four major distribution hubs in southern Gaza. It will use these to distribute aid to families that have somehow been screened for any connections to Hamas.
The hubs will be guarded by armed US private security contractors and their locations will do much to enable the relocation of Palestinians to the three small zones determined by the IDF.
In other words, a US-backed organisation employing US security guards is enabling the Israeli government’s plan to clear most of Gaza’s population into what are essentially small holding pens before they can be forcibly relocated overseas.
This has led the GHF’s executive director, Jake Wood, to resign this week. Wood said it had become “clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.
Right across the Middle East, the war in Gaza is commonly seen as an Israeli/US operation, with Washington providing a huge array of weapons and US Army personnel operating radar systems within the country.
From this week, there will also be an armed US organisation directly involved in the mass movement of Palestinians in a new Nakba. That alone increases the chances of further attacks like last week’s killings in Washington.
