The genocide must end

                                                 Commentary

    

            By Reginald Johnson

        

    How long will the world community stand by and do nothing?

   For five months, Israel has been conducting a brutal, some would say barbaric military campaign to punish the people of Palestine for the attacks of October 7, when Hamas extremists assaulted a music festival in Israel, killing over 1,200 people.

  Israel says their military operation in Gaza is only targeting individuals tied to Hamas (which is the governing authority for Palestine) but news reports say otherwise. Israel has carried out a carpet bombing campaign which has leveled apartment buildings, schools, and universities. There have been airstrikes as well on hospitals, churches, mosques, refugee camps, food centers and ambulances. All these attacks are war crimes under international law.

   At this point, more than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been killed.  The real fatality figure is probably a lot higher because not everyone has been accounted for, including people whose bodies are under the rubble of destroyed buildings.

 Another 1.5 million people have been displaced from their homes.

 Israeli authorities have also blocked aid trucks from getting into Gaza, resulting in acute food shortages. UN officials say that more and more people are going hungry and cases of starvation have already been verified.

  A group of UN experts declared recently that “Israel has been intentionally starving” Gaza, and that “widespread famine” in the besieged enclave is “imminent,” according to a report in Mondoweiss.

  “We’ve never seen a civilian population made to go hungry so completely and so quickly,” said Michael Fahkri, UN Special Rapporteur. “Never in modern history.”

   Medical care in Gaza is also collapsing, as hospitals and health facilities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing. This has led to people dying from inadequate medical care and disease.

 The death toll in Gaza could jump exponentially with the onset of famine and the spread of disease. Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of the global public health division at the University of Edinburgh, predicts that a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population --- close to half of 1 million human beings --- could die within a year.

 Almost on a daily basis, atrocities are being carried out against Palestinians, particularly in Gaza but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem --- territories illegally occupied by Israel for the past 57 years.

 On Thursday, at least 21 Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of people waiting for aid in Gaza City in the same area that was targeted hours earlier, according to the Al Jazeera news service. In the earlier incident, the same food distribution point at the Kuwait roundabout, Israel forces shot dead at least six Palestinians, according to the report. Israeli officials claimed that it was actually Palestinians who were shooting at their own people.

 On Wednesday, Israeli forces attacked a food distribution center in Gaza killing one worker and injuring 22, according to the BBC.

 Also on Wednesday, in  East Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing with fireworks. Eyewitnesses said the boy posed no threat to the soldiers and was using small fireworks.

 On February 29, UN officials reported that 112 people were killed when Israeli forces opened fire on a group that gathered around a food supply truck in the early morning hours. In what is being called the "Flour Massacre,” a number of people were killed by gunshots while others died after being trampled by the crowd that went into frenzy after the gunfire erupted. Others died when they were run over by the truck that began driving away to escape the chaos.

 On February 15, dozens of doctors were detained and tortured after a raid by Israeli forces on Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to the BBC. The doctors were forced to strip, were blindfolded, forced to remain in a kneeling position, and then were beaten, One doctor was set upon by muzzled dogs, the report said.

 Israeli spokesmen said the IDF raided the hospital because they had evidence Hamas fighters were hiding there.

  Also in February, two little Palestinian girls, sisters, who were putting water into a bucket in the courtyard of their home, were shot dead by an IOF tank. When their father came out and lay down next to them, he was shot dead, too.

The atrocities, the indiscriminate killings, the vast numbers of people being killed and the apparent attempt to engineer a famine, all point towards one conclusion: Israel is conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians.

 The International Court of Justice reached a similar conclusion when it determined that there was a “plausible case” to be made that Israel was carrying out a "genocide" in Gaza.

 It's clear a great moral crime against humanity is taking place in Gaza.

What is happening in Palestine rivals the ethnic cleansing/genocidal campaigns that took place in the 1990s in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. 

The question is, what is the world going to do about this, if anything?

Certainly some in the UN are oriented to taking action. Fahkri and some of his other colleagues on March 5 called for an arms embargo against Israel until Israel ceases its military campaign.

 A majority of countries on the Security Council of the UN have also agreed to a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.

                    

Backers of a ceasefire in Gaza lobby for support from the City Council in Bridgeport, CT  The council approved a ceasefire resolution. (Reginald Johnson photo)

 But every time a ceasefire resolution has been presented to the Security Council, the United States has used its veto to kill it, making clear that the United States is the major stumbling block for the world taking collective action against Israel to stop the genocide.

 President Biden has talked recently, as have other Democratic Party leaders about the need for Israel to control its military forces and avoid civilian casualties. However, talk is cheap. The fact is Biden has not gotten tough with Israel to really back up his words. He could threaten the cutoff of aid to Israel to force that nation to stop the carnage, but he hasn’t done that. He could also ask the US ambassador at the UN to vote with the other nations on the Security Council in passing a resolution ordering Israel to stop its military operations. But he hasn’t done that either.

So until the United States changes its position on what Israel is doing that nation is going to continue with its grossly immoral and totally illegal ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.

The United States is the key. The policy here must change. This is why it’s so important that people on the local level continue to speak out and press their members of Congress as well as the White House to get on board behind a cease-fire and insist that Israel stop its barbaric operations. It should be noted that Congress has been as bad as Biden has been on the issue of Israel --- most members in Congress still oppose a cease-fire in Gaza, and that includes both Republicans and Democrats.

 It is somewhat of an indictment of our democracy that while a strong majority of the American people want a cease-fire in Gaza a strong majority in Congress are against it. This is almost entirely because of the huge contributions that are given by pro- Israel lobbies to members of Congress in both parties. The members of our national legislature are in Israel’s pocket.

People and voters have to make it clear to these members of Congress that they need to change their positions and get behind a cease-fire and in turn put pressure on the Biden administration to insist that Israel also agree to a cease-fire, or they will be voted out.

 The genocide in Gaza must be stopped.

 

 

 

 

 

   

Demanding Action on Fukushima

                                          

 By Reginald Johnson

                                

    A determined group of anti-nuclear activists are working feverishly to spread the word about the grave dangers posed by the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, and demanding that other countries get involved in making sure that the plant doesn’t have a catastrophic nuclear accident.

  Recently the group delivered a petition to the United Nations with over 150,000 signatures which asks that UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other world leaders take immediate steps to intervene in the Fukushima situation, by sending a team of elite scientists and engineers to Japan to oversee the safe dismantling of the plant.

  The company that owns the facility, Tokyo Electric Power Company, on Monday began the removal of 1300 highly radioactive fuel rods from an unstable storage building at Reactor 4.  The work is expected to last a year.

 But activists such as long-time nuclear power critic Harvey Wasserman maintain that TEPCO does not have the expertise to handle this operation properly, and there’s the possibility of a major accident.

  Wasserman and others say the fuel rods (now in a cooling pool) are in some cases bent or embrittled, and the removal will be extremely tricky. Should any of the rods break, hit each other, or get exposed to the air, there could be an explosion and serious radiation releases.

   The amount of radiation that could potentially be released if all the rods were caught up in an explosion is 14,000 times the amount contained in the fallout from the Hiroshima bomb, according to Hiroaki  Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute.

   Charles Perrow, a professor at Yale University said the amount of radioactive caesium - 137 in the spent fuel pool is 10 times the amount that was present in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986. Radiation from the Chernobyl meltdown spread around the world. At Fukushima, one slip-up in the removal process would trigger a chain reaction, Perrow told ABC News.

  “This has me very scared,” he said. “Tokyo would have to be evacuated because caesium and other poisons that are there will spread very rapidly.”

   At a gathering Nov. 7 at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza outside the UN prior to the delivery of the petition and accompanying letter, Wasserman and other activists spoke about their work and the Fukushima crisis. A number of those present were members of  the group the “Green Shadow Cabinet,” an alternative presidential cabinet whose members often speak in opposition to government policies and offer progressive alternatives.

  “The letter we’re delivering promotes a plan developed by 16 top nuclear experts urging that the government of Japan transfer responsibility for the Fukushima reactor site to a worldwide engineering group….this plan stresses that the clean-up be overseen by a civil society panel and an international group of nuclear experts independent from TEPCO and the International Atomic Energy Admnistration (IAEA),” Wasserman said.

  Also speaking was Dr. Margaret Flowers,  a pediatrician and another member of the Green Shadow Cabinet.  “There is the potential for a massive release of radiation that would have significant health effects for people and other life across the world --- from Japan to the Pacific Islands to the continental United States, “ she said.

  Flowers added,  “The U.S. government and many regulatory bodies are dominated by the nuclear industry and have failed to take appropriate action to provide assistance to Japan. We can’t cross our fingers and hope that TEPCO pulls it off,”

 

  Also on hand was Dr. Jill Stein, the president of the Green Shadow Cabinet and Green Party presidential candidate in the 2012 national election.

 Stein spoke about the need for transparency in the information coming out about Fukushima and the clean-up operation --- also known as decommissioning.

  “The media must be provided with timely, accurate information and must report on Fukushima throughout this critical phase. The public needs to know what’s going on, step by step,” said Stein.

  The problem with the Reactor 4 spent fuel rods is by no means the only issue of concern at Fukushima Daiichi, which was struck by an earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011. The natural disaster caused over 18,000 deaths.

   Three entire reactor cores are missing since the earthquake; massive amounts of radiated water has leaked from the plant into the Pacific Ocean, contaminating sea life; thousands more radioactive spent fuel rods lie in storage buildings around the facility, creating additional health risks in the event of another earthquake.

 

    The activists will continue to agitate to get the word out about the dangers posed by Fukushima and the need for a proper clean-up. More petition drives and actions are planned.

    Wasserman said he and others also will engage in a fast on the 11^th day of every month, “to honor the victims of this horrible disaster, and to focus our efforts on finding ways to survive it.”