Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China. 

The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but recognizing that the U.S. is funding a deadly “stalemate war” that needs to be “brought to a conclusion.” 

But in all the other hot spots around the world, Rubio is likely to make conflicts even hotter, or start new ones.

1. His obsession with regime change in Cuba will sink any chance of better relations with the island. 

Like other Cuban-American politicians, Marco Rubio has built his career on vilifying the Cuban Revolution and trying to economically strangle and starve into submission the people of his parents’ homeland. 

It is ironic, therefore, that his parents left Cuba before the Revolution, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose executioners, secret police and death squads killed an estimated 20,000 people, according to the CIA, leading to a wildly popular revolution in 1959.

When President Obama began to restore relations with Cuba in 2014, Rubio swore to do “everything possible” to obstruct and reverse that policy. In May 2024, Rubio reiterated his zero tolerance for any kind of social or economic contacts between the U.S. and Cuba, claiming that any easing of the U.S. blockade will only “strengthen the oppressive regime and undermine the opposition… Until there is freedom in Cuba, the United States must maintain a firm stance.” 

In 2024 Rubio also introduced legislation to ensure that Cuba would remain on the U.S. “State Sponsor of Terrorism List,” imposing sanctions that cut Cuba off from the U.S.-dominated Western banking system.

These measures to destroy the Cuban economy have led to a massive wave of migration in the past two years. But when the U.S. Coast Guard tried to coordinate with their Cuban counterparts, Rubio introduced legislation to prohibit such interaction. While Trump has vowed to stem immigration, his Secretary of State wants to crush Cuba’s economy, forcing people to abandon the island and set sail for the United States.

2. Applying his anti-Cuba template to the rest of Latin America will make enemies of more of our neighbors.

Rubio’s disdain for his ancestral home in Cuba has served him so well as an American politician that he has extended it to the rest of Latin America. He has sided with extreme right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina, and rails against progressive ones, from Brazil’s Ignacio Lula da Silva to Mexico’s popular former President Lopez Obrador, whom he called “an apologist for tyranny” for supporting other leftist governments.

In Venezuela, he has promoted brutal sanctions and regime change plots to topple the government of Nicolas Maduro. In 2019 he was one of the architects of Trump’s failed policy of recognizing opposition figure Juan Guaido as president. He has also advocated for sanctions and regime change in Nicaragua.

In March 2023, Rubio urged President Biden to impose sanctions on Bolivia for prosecuting  leaders of a 2019 U.S.-backed coup that led to massacres that killed at least 21 people. 

Rubio also condemned the government of Honduras for withdrawing from an extradition treaty with the United States this past August, in response to decades of U.S. interference that had turned Honduras into a narco-state riven by poverty, gang violence and mass emigration, until the election of democratic socialist President Xiomara Castro in 2022.

Rubio’s major concern about Latin America now seems to be the influence of China, which has become the leading trade partner of most Latin American countries. Unlike the U.S., China focuses on economic benefits and not internal politics, while American politicians like Marco Rubio still see Latin America as the U.S. “backyard.”

While Rubio’s virulent anti-leftist stands have served him well in climbing to senior positions in the U.S. government, and now into Trump’s inner circle, his disdain for Latin American sovereignty bodes ill for U.S. relations with the region.

3. He believes the US and Israel can do no wrong, and that God has given Palestine to Israel.

Despite the massive death toll in Gaza and global condemnation of Israel’s genocide, Rubio still perpetuates the myth that “Israel takes extraordinary steps to avoid civilian losses” and that innocent people die in Gaza because Hamas has deliberated placed them in the way and used them as human shields. The problem, he says, is “an enemy that doesn’t value human life.”

When asked by CODEPINK in November 2024 if he would support a ceasefire, Rubio replied, “On the contrary. I want them to destroy every element of Hamas they can get their hands on. These people are vicious animals.”

There are few times in this past year that the Biden administration has tried to restrain Israel, but when Biden begged Israel not to send troops into the southern city of Rafah, Rubio said that was like telling the Allied forces in World War II not to attack Berlin to get Hitler. 

In a letter to Secretary of State Blinken in August 2024, Rubio criticized the Biden administration’s decision to sanction Israeli settlers linked to anti-Palestinian violence in the occupied West Bank. 

“Israel has consistently sought peace with the Palestinians. It is unfortunate that the Palestinians, whether it be the Palestinian Authority or FTOs [Foreign Terrorist Organisations] such as Hamas, have rejected such overtures,” Rubio wrote. “Israelis rightfully living in their historic homeland are not the impediment to peace; the Palestinians are,” he added.

No country besides Israel subscribes to the idea that its borders should be based on 2,000-year-old religious scriptures, and that it has a God-given right to displace or exterminate people who have lived there since then to reconquer its ancient homeland. The United States will find itself  extraordinarily isolated from the rest of the world if Rubio tries to assert that as a matter of U.S. policy.     

4. His deep-seated enmity toward Iran will fuel Israel’s war on its neighbors, and may lead to a U.S. war with Iran. 

Rubio is obsessed with Iran. He claims that the central cause of violence and suffering in the Middle East is not Israeli policy but “Iran’s ambition to be a regional hegemonic power.” He says that Iran’s goal in the Middle East is to “seek to drive America out of the region and then destroy Israel.”

He has been a proponent of maximum pressure on Iran, including a call for more and more sanctions. He believes the U.S. should not re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, saying: “We must not trade away U.S. and Israeli security for vague commitments from a terrorist-sponsoring regime that has killed Americans and threatens to annihilate Israel.”

Rubio calls Lebanon’s Hezbollah a “full blown agent of Iran right on Israel’s border” and that wiping out Hezbollah’s leadership, along with entire neighborhoods full of civilians, is a “service to humanity.” He alleges that Iran has control over Iraq, Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and is a threat to Jordan. He claims that “Iran has put a noose around Israel,” and says that the goal of U.S. policy should be regime change in Iran, which would set the stage for war. 

While there will hopefully be leaders in the Pentagon who will caution Donald Trump about the perils of a war with Iran, Rubio will not be a voice of reason.

5. He is beholden to big money, from the weapons industry to the Israel lobby.

Open Secrets reports that Rubio has received over a million dollars in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups during his career. The Pro-Israel America PAC was his single largest campaign contributor over the last 5 years. When he last ran for reelection in 2022, he was the third largest recipient of funding by pro-Israel groups in the Senate, taking in $367,000 from them for that campaign.

Rubio was also the fourth largest recipient of funding from the “defense” industry in the Senate for the 2022 cycle, receiving $196,000. Altogether, the weapons industry has invested $663,000 in his Congressional career.

Rubio is clearly beholden to the US arms industry, and even more so to the Israel lobby, which has been one of his largest sources of campaign funding. This has placed him in the vanguard of Congress’s blind, unconditional support for Israel and subservience to Israeli narratives and propaganda, making it unlikely that he will ever challenge the ongoing extermination of the Palestinian people or their expulsion from their homeland. 

6. He’s so antagonistic towards China that China has sanctioned him–twice!

Speaking at the Heritage Foundation in 2022, Rubio said: “The gravest threat facing America today, the challenge that will define this century and every generation represented here, is not climate change, the pandemic, or the left’s version of social justice. The threat that will define this century is China.”

It will be hard for our nation’s “top diplomat” to ease tensions with a country he has so maligned. He antagonized China by co-sponsoring the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which allows the U.S. to bar  Chinese imports over alleged Uyghur rights abuses, abuses that China denies and independent researchers question. In fact, Rubio has gone so far as to accuse China of a “grotesque campaign of genocide” against the Uyghurs.

On Taiwan, he has not only introduced legislation to increase military aid to the island, but actually supports Taiwanese independence — a dangerous deviation from the US government’s long-standing One China approach. 

The Chinese responded to Rubio by sanctioning him, not once but twice–once regarding the Uyghurs and once for his support of Hong Kong protests. Unless China lifts the sanctions, he would be the first U.S. secretary of state to be banned from even visiting China.

Analysts expect China to try to sidestep Rubio and engage directly with Trump and other senior officials. Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at the U.K.’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told Reuters, “If that doesn’t work, then I think we’re going to get into a much more regular escalation of a bad relationship.”

7. Rubio knows sanctions are a trap, but he doesn’t know how to escape.

Rubio is a leading advocate of unilateral economic sanctions, which are illegal under international law, and which the UN and other countries refer to as “unilateral economic coercive measures.”

The United States has used these measures so widely and wildly that they now impact a third of the world’s population. U.S. officials, from Treasury Secretary Yellen to Rubio himself, have warned that using the U.S. financial system and the dollar’s reserve currency status as weapons against other countries is driving the rest of the world to conduct trade in other currencies and develop alternative financial systems.

In March 2023, Rubio complained on Fox News, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

And yet Rubio has continued to be a leading sponsor of sanctions bills in the Senate, including new sanctions on Iran in January 2024 and a bill in July to sanction foreign banks that participate in alternative financial systems.

So, while other countries develop new financial and trading systems to escape abusive, illegal U.S. sanctions, the nominee for Secretary of State remains caught in the same sanctions trap that he complained about on Fox.

8. He wants to crack down on U.S. free speech.

Rubio wants to curtail the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In May, he described campus protests against Israel as a “complete breakdown of law and order.” 

Rubio claimed to be speaking up for other students at American universities. “[They] paid a lot of money to go to these schools, [but are being disrupted by] a few thousand antisemitic zombies who have been brainwashed by two decades of indoctrination in the belief that the world is divided between victimizers and victims, and that the victimizers in this particular case, the ones that are oppressing people, are Jews in Israel,” said Rubio.

The Florida senator has said he supports Trump’s plan to deport foreign students who engage in pro-Palestinian campus protests. In April, he called for punishing supporters of the Israel boycott movement as part of efforts to counter antisemitism, falsely equating any attempt to respond to Israel’s international crimes with antisemitism.

And what about those crimes, which the students are protesting? After visiting Israel in May, Rubio wrote an article for National Review, in which he never mentioned the thousands of civilians Israel has killed, and instead blamed Iran, Biden and “morally corrupt international institutions” for the crisis.

Marco Rubio expects Americans to believe that it is not genocide itself, but protests against genocide, that are a complete breakdown of law and order. He couldn’t be more wrong if he tried.

Students are not Rubio’s only target. In August 2023, he alleged that certain “far-left and antisemitic entities” may have violated the Foreign Assistance Registration Act by their ties to China. He called for a Justice Department investigation into 18 groups, starting with CODEPINK. These unfounded claims of China connections are only meant to intimidate legitimate groups that are exercising their free speech rights. 

Conclusion

On each of these issues, Rubio has shown no sign of understanding the difference between domestic politics and diplomacy. Whether he’s talking about Cuba, Palestine, Iran or China, or even about CODEPINK, all his supposedly tough positions are based on cynically mischaracterizing the actions and motivations of his enemies and then attacking the “straw man” he has falsely set up.

Unscrupulous politicians often get away with that, and Rubio has made it his signature tactic because it works so well for him in American politics. But that will not work if and when he sits down to negotiate with other world leaders as U.S. secretary of state. 

His underlying attitude to foreign relations is, like Trump’s, that the United States must get its way or else, and that other countries who won’t submit must be coerced, threatened, couped, bombed or invaded. This makes Rubio just as ill-equipped as Antony Blinken to conduct diplomacy, improve U.S. relations with other countries or resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully, as the UN Charter requires.

Via Code Pink .

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

The Young Turks: “MARCO RUBIO Reportedly Tapped As Secretary Of State”

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.     

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. 

“Against the World,” Digital, ChatGPT, PS Express, 2024

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China. 

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel. 

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state. 

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions. 

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.       

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated. 

After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States. 

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict. 

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

 A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

Via Code Pink

For years, Iran has been trying to avoid such a war. That is why it signed the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement with the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, China and the European Union. Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and despite Joe Biden’s much-touted differences with Trump, he failed to restore U.S. compliance. Instead, he tried to use Trump’s violation of the treaty as leverage to demand further concessions from Iran. This only served to further aggravate the schism between the United States and Iran, which have had no diplomatic relations since 1980.

Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees his long-awaited chance to draw the United States into war with Iran. By killing Iranian military leaders and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil, as well as attacking Iran’s allies in Lebanon and Yemen, Netanyahu provoked a military response from Iran that has given him an excuse to widen the conflict even further. Tragically, there are warmongering U.S. officials who would welcome a war on Iran, and many more who would blindly go along with it.

Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, campaigned on a platform of reconciling with the West. When he came to New York to speak at the UN General Assembly on September 25, he was accompanied by three members of Iran’s JCPOA negotiating team: former foreign minister Javad Zarif; current foreign minister Abbas Araghchi; and deputy foreign minister Majid Ravanchi.

President Pezeshkian’s message in New York was conciliatory. With Zarif and Araghchi at his side at a press conference on September 23, he talked of peace, and of reviving the dormant nuclear agreement. “Vis-a-vis the JCPOA, we said 100 times we are willing to live up to our agreements,” he said. “We do hope we can sit at the table and hold discussions.”

On the crisis in the Middle East, Pezeshkian said that Iran wanted peace and had exercised restraint in the face of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, its assassinations of resistance leaders and Iranian officials, and its war on its neighbors. 

“Let’s create a situation where we can co-exist,” said Pezeshkian. “Let’s try to resolve tensions through dialogue…We are willing to put all of our weapons aside so long as Israel will do the same.” He added that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, while Israel is not, and that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to Iran.

Pezeshkian reiterated Iran’s desire for peace in his speech at the UN General Assembly.

“Yahoo-Tank,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

“I am the president of a country that has endured threats, war, occupation, and sanctions throughout its modern history,” he said. “Others have neither come to our assistance nor respected our declared neutrality. Global powers have even sided with aggressors. We have learned that we can only rely on our own people and our own indigenous capabilities. The Islamic Republic of Iran seeks to safeguard its own security, not to create insecurity for others. We want peace for all and seek no war or quarrel with anyone.”

The U.S. response to Iran’s restraint throughout this crisis has been to keep sending destructive weapons to Israel, with which it has devastated Gaza, killed tens of thousands of women and children, bombed neighboring capitals, and beefed up the forces it would need to attack Iran. 

That includes a new order for 50 F-15EX long-range bombers, with 750 gallon fuel tanks for the long journey to Iran. That arms deal still has to pass the Senate, where Senator Bernie Sanders is leading the opposition. 

On the diplomatic front, the U.S. vetoed successive cease-fire resolutions in the UN Security Council and hijacked Qatar and Egypt’s cease-fire negotiations to provide diplomatic cover for unrestricted genocide.

Military leaders in the United States and Israel appear to be arguing against war on Iran, as they have in the past. Even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney balked at launching another catastrophic war based on lies against Iran, after the CIA publicly admitted in its 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran was not developing nuclear weapons. 

When Trump threatened to attack Iran, Tulsi Gabbard warned him that a U.S. war on Iran would be so catastrophic that it would finally, retroactively, make the war on Iraq look like the “cakewalk” the neocons had promised it would be.

But neither U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin nor Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant can control their countries’ war policies, which are in the hands of political leaders with political agendas. Netanyahu has spent many years trying to draw the United States into a war with Iran, and has kept escalating the Gaza crisis for a year, at the cost of tens of thousands of innocent lives, with that goal clearly in mind.

Biden has been out of his depth throughout this crisis, relying on political instincts from an era when acting tough and blindly supporting Israel were politically safe positions for American politicians. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rose to power through the National Security Council and as a Senate staffer, not as a diplomat, riding Biden’s coat-tails into a senior position where he is as out of his depth as his boss.

Meanwhile, pro-Iran militia groups in Iraq warn that, if the U.S. joins in strikes on Iran, they will target U.S. bases in Iraq and the region.

So we are careening toward a catastrophic war with Iran, with no U.S. diplomatic leadership and only Trump and Harris waiting in the wings. As Trita Parsi wrote in Responsible Statecraft, “If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most core security interest here — avoiding war.”

Via Code Pink

If Israel predictably fails to heed a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further. 

It could convene an Emergency Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the procedure was first adopted in 1950.

The September 18 resolution comes in response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are being maintained in violation of international law.” 

The court ruled that Israel’s obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.

Israel’s President Netanyahu cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is  exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s 1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those territories, or make them part of Israel.

While Israel used its hotly disputed account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of violence there, too. 

Armed settlers immediately started seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable. 

Since last October, occupation forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed at least 700 people, including 159 children.

“UNGA,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

The escalation of violence and land seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and their organizations. 

In Gaza, the Israeli military has been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the massacre were to end soon.

Israel and the United States are undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide. Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”

President Biden can claim to be exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide. 

By failing to use any of its substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want, while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.

This is a continuation of the strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967, falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.

In addition to cynically undermining any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United States.

China has taken a more constructive approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to seat a new elected government.

Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government “blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace conference to try to end the war.

As the world comes together in the General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.

Perhaps no crisis more clearly embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the 57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in 1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal settlement building.

The ability of one Permanent Member of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system. 

When this structure was first announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”

The General Assembly and the Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the world calling in unison for peace in Gaza. 

Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian self-determination and human rights.

For many decades, the United States’ unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the Palestinian people. 

In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S. military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.

The supply chain for the U.S. arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter buildings, flesh and bones.  

The U.S. role is greater than complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas. 

And it is precisely because of the essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.

Every American of conscience should keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political will to end the genocide.

It would certainly be unprecedented for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of Iraq failed to provoke such united action. 

But the lesson of that crisis, indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.

Via Code Pink

The full details of the U.S. proposal have yet to be made public, but the pause in Israeli attacks and release of hostages in the first phase would reportedly lead to further negotiations for a more lasting cease-fire and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the second phase. But there is no guarantee that the second round of negotiations would succeed. 

As former Israeli Labor Party prime minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on June 3rd, “How do you think [Gaza military commander] Sinwar will react when he is told: but be quick, because we still have to kill you, after you return all the hostages?”

Meanwhile, as Hamas pointed out, Israel has not publicly accepted the terms of the latest U.S. cease-fire proposal, so it has only the word of U.S. officials that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has privately agreed to it. In public, Netanyahu still insists that he is committed to the complete destruction of Hamas and its governing authority in Gaza, and has actually stepped up Israel’s vicious attacks in central and southern Gaza.  

The basic disagreement that President Joe Biden and Secretary Blinken’s smoke and mirrors cannot hide is that Hamas, like every Palestinian, wants a real end to the genocide, while the Israeli and U.S. governments do not. 

Biden or Netanyahu could end the slaughter very quickly if they wanted to—Netanyahu by agreeing to a permanent cease-fire, or Biden by ending or suspending U.S. weapons deliveries to Israel. Israel could not carry out this war without U.S. military and diplomatic support. But Biden refuses to use his leverage, even though he has admitted in an interview that it was “reasonable” to conclude that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit. 

Guardian News Video: “United States vetoes Palestinian request for full UN membership as UK abstains from vote”

The U.S. is still sending weapons to Israel to continue the massacre in violation of a cease-fire order by the International Court of Justice. Bipartisan U.S. leaders have invited Netanyahu to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 24, even as the International Criminal Court reviews a request by its chief prosecutor for an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes, crimes against humanity and murder.

The United States seems determined to share Israel’s self-inflicted isolation from voices calling for peace from all over the world, including large majorities of countries in the UN General Assembly and Security Council. 

But perhaps this is appropriate, as the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for that isolation. By its decades of unconditional support for Israel, and by using its UN Security Council veto dozens of times to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States has enabled successive Israeli governments to pursue flagrantly criminal policies and to thumb their noses at the growing outrage of people and countries across the world.

This pattern of U.S. support for Israel goes all the way back to its founding, when Zionist leaders in Palestine unleashed a well-planned operation to seize much more territory than the UN allocated to their new state in its partition plan, which the Palestinians and neighboring countries already firmly opposed. 

The massacres, the bulldozed villages and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 to a million people in the Nakba have been meticulously documented, despite an extraordinary propaganda campaign to persuade two generations of Israelis, Americans and Europeans that they never happened.

The U.S. was the first country to grant Israel de facto recognition on May 14, 1948, and played a leading role in the 1949 UN votes to recognize the new state of Israel within its illegally seized borders. President Eisenhower had the wisdom to oppose Britain, France and Israel in their war to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, but Israel’s seizure of the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 1967 persuaded U.S. leaders that it could be a valuable military ally in the Middle East.

Unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and annexation of more and more territory over the past 57 years has corrupted Israeli politics and encouraged increasingly extreme and racist Israeli governments to keep expanding their genocidal territorial ambitions. Netanyahu’s Likud party and government now fully embrace their Greater Israel plan to annex all of occupied Palestine and parts of other countries, wherever and whenever new opportunities for expansion present themselves.

Israel’s de facto expansion has been facilitated by the United States’ monopoly over mediation between Israel and Palestine, which it has aggressively staked out and defended against the UN and other countries. The irreconcilable contradiction between the U.S.’s conflicting roles as Israel’s most powerful military ally and the principal mediator between Israel and Palestine is obvious to the whole world. 

But as we see even in the midst of the genocide in Gaza, the rest of the world and the UN have failed to break this U.S. monopoly and establish legitimate, impartial mediation by the UN or neutral countries that respect the lives of Palestinians and their human and civil rights.

Qatar mediated a temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November 2023, but it has since been upstaged by U.S. moves to prolong the massacre through deceptive proposals, cynical posturing and Security Council vetoes. The U.S. consistently vetoes all but its own proposals on Israel and Palestine in the UN Security Council, even when its own proposals are deliberately meaningless, ineffective or counterproductive. 

The UN General Assembly is united in support of Palestine, voting almost unanimously year after year to demand an end to the Israeli occupation. A hundred and forty-four countries have recognized Palestine as a country, and only the U.S. veto denies it full UN membership. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has even shamed the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) into suspending their ingrained pro-Western bias and pursuing cases against Israel.

One way that the nations of the world could come together to apply greater pressure on Israel to end its assault on Gaza would be a “Uniting for Peace” resolution in the UN General Assembly. This is a measure the General Assembly can take when the Security Council is prevented from acting to restore peace and security by the veto of a permanent member.

Israel has demonstrated that it is prepared to ignore cease-fire resolutions by the General Assembly and the Security Council, and an order by the ICJ, but a Uniting for Peace resolution could impose penalties on Israel for its actions, such as an arms embargo or an economic boycott. If the United States still insists on continuing its complicity in Israel’s international crimes, the General Assembly could take action against the U.S. too.

A General Assembly resolution would change the terms of the international debate and shift the focus back from Biden and Blinken’s diversionary tactics to the urgency of enforcing the lasting cease-fire that the whole world is calling for.

It is time for the United Nations and neutral countries to push Israel’s U.S. partner in genocide to the side, and for legitimate international authorities and mediators to take responsibility for enforcing international law, ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine and bringing peace to the Middle East.

The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and of course Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

A Deluge of American Bombs

During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

AP Video: “UCLA faculty and staff denounce university’s handling of student Gaza protest”

General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

Ground force weapons

Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns. Israel also used its Apaches to kill and incinerate a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7, 2023—a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a false pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law and of the Genocide Convention.

Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to Members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily-armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

Gaza Encampments Take On the Merchants of Death

The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.

The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Via Code Pink

The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will  be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?

 Photo credit: Medea Benjamin

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated  rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf  was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, to every man in Gaza, based mainly on cellphone and social media data, and automatically adds those with high scores to its kill list of suspected militants. Israel uses another automated system, known as “Where’s Daddy?”, to call in airstrikes to kill these men and their families in their homes.

The report is based on interviews with six Israeli intelligence officers who have worked with these systems. As one of the officers explained to +972, by adding a name from a Lavender-generated list to the Where’s Daddy home tracking system, he can place the man’s home under constant drone surveillance, and an airstrike will be launched once he comes home.

The officers said the “collateral” killing of the men’s extended families was of little consequence to Israel. “Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10 [civilians in the house],” the officer said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were women and children.”

The officers explained that the decision to target thousands of these men in their homes is just a question of expediency. It is simply easier to wait for them to come home to the address on file in the system, and then bomb that house or apartment building, than to search for them in the chaos of the war-torn Gaza Strip.

The officers who spoke to 972+ explained that in previous Israeli massacres in Gaza, they could not generate targets quickly enough to satisfy their political and military bosses, and so these AI systems were designed to solve that problem for them. The speed with which Lavender can generate new targets only gives its human minders an average of 20 seconds to review and rubber-stamp each name, even though they know from tests of the Lavender system that at least 10% of the men chosen for assassination and familicide have only an insignificant or a mistaken connection with Hamas or PIJ. 

The Lavender AI system is a new weapon, developed by Israel. But the kind of kill lists that it generates have a long pedigree in U.S. wars, occupations and CIA regime change operations. Since the birth of the CIA after the Second World War, the technology used to create kill lists has evolved from the CIA’s earliest coups in Iran and Guatemala, to Indonesia and the Phoenix program in Vietnam in the 1960s, to Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and to the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Just as U.S. weapons development aims to be at the cutting edge, or the killing edge, of new technology, the CIA and U.S. military intelligence have always tried to use the latest data processing technology to identify and kill their enemies.

The CIA learned some of these methods from German intelligence officers captured at the end of the Second World War. Many of the names on Nazi kill lists were generated by an intelligence unit called Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), under the command of Major General Reinhard Gehlen, Germany’s spy chief on the eastern front(see David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 268).

Gehlen and the FHO had no computers, but they did have access to four million Soviet POWs from all over the USSR, and no compunction about torturing them to learn the names of Jews and communist officials in their hometowns to compile kill lists for the Gestapo and Einsatzgruppen.

After the war, like the 1,600 German scientists spirited out of Germany in Operation Paperclip, the United States flew Gehlen and his senior staff to Fort Hunt in Virginia. They were welcomed by Allen Dulles, soon to be the first and still the longest-serving director of the CIA. Dulles sent them back to Pullach in occupied Germany to resume their anti-Soviet operations as CIA agents. The Gehlen Organization formed the nucleus of what became the BND, the new West German intelligence service, with Reinhard Gehlen as its director until he retired in 1968.

After a CIA coup removed Iran’s popular, democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, a CIA team led by U.S. Major General Norman Schwarzkopf trained a new intelligence service, known as SAVAK, in the use of kill lists and torture. SAVAK used these skills to purge Iran’s government and military of suspected communists and later to hunt down anyone who dared to oppose the Shah.

By 1975, Amnesty International estimated that Iran was holding between 25,000 and 100,000 political prisoners, and had “the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture that is beyond belief.”

In Guatemala, a CIA coup in 1954 replaced the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with a brutal dictatorship. As resistance grew in the 1960s, U.S. special forces joined the Guatemalan army in a scorched earth campaign in Zacapa, which killed 15,000 people to defeat a few hundred armed rebels. Meanwhile, CIA-trained urban death squads abducted, tortured and killed PGT (Guatemalan Labor Party) members in Guatemala City, notably 28 prominent labor leaders who were abducted and disappeared in March 1966.

Once this first wave of resistance was suppressed, the CIA set up a new telecommunications center and intelligence agency, based in the presidential palace. It compiled a database of “subversives” across the country that included leaders of farming co-ops and labor, student and indigenous activists, to provide ever-growing lists for the death squads. The resulting civil war became a genocide against indigenous people in Ixil and the western highlands that killed or disappeared at least 200,000 people.

TRT World Video: “‘Lavender’: How Israel’s AI system is killing Palestinians in Gaza”

This pattern was repeated across the world, wherever popular, progressive leaders offered hope to their people in ways that challenged U.S. interests. As historian Gabriel Kolko wrote in 1988, “The irony of U.S. policy in the Third World is that, while it has always justified its larger objectives and efforts in the name of anticommunism, its own goals have made it unable to tolerate change from any quarter that impinged significantly on its own interests.”

When General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965, the U.S. Embassy compiled a list of 5,000 communists for his death squads to hunt down and kill. The CIA estimated that they eventually killed 250,000 people, while other estimates run as high as a million.

Twenty-five years later, journalist Kathy Kadane investigated the U.S. role in the massacre in Indonesia, and spoke to Robert Martens, the political officer who led the State-CIA team that compiled the kill list. “It really was a big help to the army,” Martens told Kadane. “They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands. But that’s not all bad – there’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

Kathy Kadane also spoke to former CIA director William Colby, who was the head of the CIA’s Far East division in the 1960s. Colby compared the U.S. role in Indonesia to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which was launched two years later, claiming that they were both successful programs to identify and eliminate the organizational structure of America’s communist enemies. 

The Phoenix program was designed to uncover and dismantle the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) shadow government across South Vietnam. Phoenix’s Combined Intelligence Center in Saigon fed thousands of names into an IBM 1401 computer, along with their locations and their alleged roles in the NLF. The CIA credited the Phoenix program with killing 26,369 NLF officials, while another 55,000 were imprisoned or persuaded to defect. Seymour Hersh reviewed South Vietnamese government documents that put the death toll at 41,000.

How many of the dead were correctly identified as NLF officials may be impossible to know, but Americans who took part in Phoenix operations reported killing the wrong people in many cases. Navy SEAL Elton Manzione told author Douglas Valentine (The Phoenix Program) how he killed two young girls in a night raid on a village, and then sat down on a stack of ammunition crates with a hand grenade and an M-16, threatening to blow himself up, until he got a ticket home. 

“The whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the “hunter-killer” teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc,” Manzione told Valentine. “That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom – that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”

Even as the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the “war fatigue” in the United States led to a more peaceful next decade, the CIA continued to engineer and support coups around the world, and to provide post-coup governments with increasingly computerized kill lists to consolidate their rule.

After supporting General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973, the CIA played a central role in Operation Condor, an alliance between right-wing military governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, to hunt down tens of thousands of their and each other’s political opponents and dissidents, killing and disappearing at least 60,000 people.

The CIA’s role in Operation Condor is still shrouded in secrecy, but Patrice McSherry, a political scientist at Long Island University, has investigated the U.S. role and concluded, “Operation Condor also had the covert support of the US government. Washington provided Condor with military intelligence and training, financial assistance, advanced computers, sophisticated tracking technology, and access to the continental telecommunications system housed in the Panama Canal Zone.”

McSherry’s research revealed how the CIA supported the intelligence services of the Condor states with computerized links, a telex system, and purpose-built encoding and decoding machines made by the CIA Logistics Department. As she wrote in her book, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America:    

“The Condor system’s secure communications system, Condortel,… allowed Condor operations centers in member countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a U.S. facility in the Panama Canal Zone. This link to the U.S. military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret U.S. sponsorship of Condor…”

Operation Condor ultimately failed, but the U.S. provided similar support and training to right-wing governments in Colombia and Central America throughout the 1980s in what senior military officers have called a “quiet, disguised, media-free approach” to repression and kill lists.

The U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Latin American officers in the use of torture and death squads, as Major Joseph Blair, the SOA’s former chief of instruction described to John Pilger for his film, The War You Don’t See:

“The doctrine that was taught was that, if you want information, you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can’t get the information you want, if you can’t get the person to shut up or stop what they’re doing, you assassinate them – and you assassinate them with one of your death squads.”

When the same methods were transferred to the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq after 2003, Newsweek headlined it “The Salvador Option.” A U.S. officer explained to Newsweek that U.S. and Iraqi death squads were targeting Iraqi civilians as well as resistance fighters. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

The United States sent two veterans of its dirty wars in Latin America to Iraq to play key roles in that campaign. Colonel James Steele led the U.S. Military Advisor Group in El Salvador from 1984 to 1986, training and supervising Salvadoran forces who killed tens of thousands of civilians. He was also deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, narrowly escaping a prison sentence for his role supervising shipments from Ilopango air base in El Salvador to the U.S.-backed Contras in Honduras and Nicaragua.

In Iraq, Steele oversaw the training of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos – rebranded as “National” and later “Federal” Police after the discovery of their al-Jadiriyah torture center and other atrocities.

Bayan al-Jabr, a commander in the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade militia, was appointed Interior Minister in 2005, and Badr militiamen were integrated into the Wolf Brigade death squad and other Special Police units. Jabr’s chief adviser was Steven Casteel, the former intelligence chief for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Latin America.

The Interior Ministry death squads waged a dirty war in Baghdad and other cities, filling the Baghdad morgue with up to 1,800 corpses per month, while Casteel fed the western media absurd cover stories, such as that the death squads were all “insurgents” in stolen police uniforms. 

Meanwhile U.S. special operations forces conducted “kill-or-capture” night raids in search of Resistance leaders. General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003-2008, oversaw the development of a database system, used in Iraq and Afghanistan, that compiled cellphone numbers mined from captured cellphones to generate an ever-expanding target list for night raids and air strikes.

The targeting of cellphones instead of actual people enabled the automation of the targeting system, and explicitly excluded using human intelligence to confirm identities. Two senior U.S. commanders told the Washington Post that only half the night raids attacked the right house or person.

In Afghanistan, President Obama put McChrystal in charge of U.S. and NATO forces in 2009, and his cellphone-based “social network analysis” enabled an exponential increase in night raids, from 20 raids per month in May 2009 to up to 40 per night by April 2011.

As with the Lavender system in Gaza, this huge increase in targets was achieved by taking a system originally designed to identify and track a small number of senior enemy commanders and applying it to anyone suspected of having links with the Taliban, based on their cellphone data.

This led to the capture of an endless flood of innocent civilians, so that most civilian detainees had to be quickly released to make room for new ones. The increased killing of innocent civilians in night raids and airstrikes fueled already fierce resistance to the U.S. and NATO occupation and ultimately led to its defeat.

President Obama’s drone campaign to kill suspected enemies in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia was just as indiscriminate, with reports suggesting that 90% of the people it killed in Pakistan were innocent civilians.

And yet Obama and his national security team kept meeting in the White House every “Terror Tuesday” to select who the drones would target that week, using an Orwellian, computerized “disposition matrix” to provide technological cover for their life and death decisions.   

Looking at this evolution of ever-more automated systems for killing and capturing enemies, we can see how, as the information technology used has advanced from telexes to cellphones and from early IBM computers to artificial intelligence, the human intelligence and sensibility that could spot mistakes, prioritize human life and prevent the killing of innocent civilians has been progressively marginalized and excluded, making these operations more brutal and horrifying than ever.

Nicolas has at least two good friends who survived the dirty wars in Latin America because someone who worked in the police or military got word to them that their names were on a death list, one in Argentina, the other in Guatemala. If their fates had been decided by an AI machine like Lavender, they would both be long dead.

As with supposed advances in other types of weapons technology, like drones and “precision” bombs and missiles, innovations that claim to make targeting more precise and eliminate human error have instead led to the automated mass murder of innocent people, especially women and children, bringing us full circle from one holocaust to the next.

Via Code Pink

This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.

At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.

What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.

When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.” 

The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery. 

The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.

A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases. 

Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.” 

Aljazeera English Video: “US carried out an airstrike in Iraq killing high-ranking member of an armed group linked to Iran”

Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.  

From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.” 

Three days later, Guerin would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared. 

But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.

Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.

Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.

Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”

After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.

The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders. 

While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.