Israeli forces kill Palestinian after settler tomb incursion in Nablus

Nick Kollerstrom The Unz Review July 18, 2023

Untrue stories exist at each end of Jewish historys three thousand years fictional, fabricated and of immense magnitude. We may start in the tenth century BCE, where archaeologists have after diligent study found no trace of King Solomon, his Temple or his empire. Half a century of intensive excavation of the Holy Land has now reached that conclusion. The alleged mighty empire of David and Solomon, stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates on the basis of which the modern state of Israel was formed did not exist. Meanwhile the Bible makes no mention of the great empire of Egypt, which really did in that period stretch from the Nile to the Euphrates. These things must be relegated to storyland, like Moses parting the Red Sea. Experts were finally attaining this negative conclusion as the new millennium dawned, e.g.

• Mythic Past, Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel, Thomas Thompson, 1999
• David and Solomon, In search of the Bibles sacred Kings, Israel Finklestein and N.A. Silberman, 2006
• The Quest for the Historical Israel, Finklestein and A. Mazar, 2007
• The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand, 2009
• Palestine, a Four Thousand Year History, Nur Masala, 2018.

Moses, Wikipedia assures us, is just a myth. The Exodus, traditionally the basis of Jewish self-identity and the most-told narrative in the western world,[1] spawns great conferences which tend to end up with the same threefold negation:

• no evidence for the Children of Israel in Egypt or escaping therefrom,
• no evidence of their trekking across the Sinai desert
• no evidence of them storming into Canaan and conquering the locals.

In modern times, Jews were given land in Palestine and called it Israel. Inspired by a great hope, their conviction was that archaeology would validate their epic history, as it had unfolded through past millennia. They went to work with a trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other but received a big shock. The Holy Land did indeed reveal to them centuries of devout monotheism during the time recorded by their ancient scriptures but, it was a reverence for the Goddess, as shown by the thousands of figurines dug up everywhere in Judea where they excavated. They were all similar with head, torso and large naked breasts.[2] Nor could any trace be discerned of a fierce invasion of Canaan by the Children of Israel as their texts averred, plus the odd record of their Jehovah-god had him with a partner, his Asherath.

It was discovered that, in the tenth century BCE there had been an intensive drought....

Back in April we noted that a BBC News website report by Lucy Williamson on the topic of violent rioting by Israelis in Huwara two months earlier promoted extensive quotes from the executive director of the political NGO Yesh Din but failed to inform readers that some of those who rioted in Huwara on February 26^th had been placed in administrative detention and two people had been indicted in connection with a later incident in the same town.

BBC NEWS WEBSITE PUBLISHES FOURTH HUWARA REPORT IN TWO MONTHS

Since then visitors to the BBC News website have found references in multiple articles to what the BBC refers to using the broad term settler violence and on June 21^st the BBC Jerusalem bureaus Tom Bateman reported on incidents f...

This Monday, Palestinians across various cities inside the occupied West Bank took to the streets in protest of the Palestinian Authoritys arrest campaign of resistance fighters wanted by the Israeli military. In the wake of Israels failed invasion of Jenin, which fell short of dealing a blow to the newly formed armed groups in the Read More...

The post Israels Attack On Jenin Failed, So Tel Aviv Uses The Palestinian Authority To Do Its Dirty Work appeared first on The Last American Vagabond.

The Cradle | July 18, 2023

US video-sharing and social media platform YouTube on 17 July closed 18 channels affiliated with Yemens ruling Ansarallah resistance movement, including those of the media bureau of Yemens Operations Command Center (OCC) and the resistances art and documentary production unit.

In a statement issued to Yemens SABA news agency, Yemeni officials called the move an arbitrary measure and intellectual terrorism that reaffirms the aggressive intentions of the US-Saudi-Emirati coalition of aggression against Yemen by harnessing their media assets to serve their colonial project. It also reveals the falsity of the slogans of freedom of opinion and expression raised by western countries.

The suspended channels reportedly had over 500,000 subscribers and hosted over 7 thousand videos with over 90 million views.

According to officials, many of the closed channels hosted art and music and did not promote any form of political hatred or incitement.

This is not the first time that YouTube and other social medial platforms have deleted Yemeni accounts or pages without any prior justification.

In 2021, the US Justice Department seized the website domain of the Yemeni Arabic-language Al-Masirah television channel and nearly three dozen other regional websites.

Social media giants often purge content that supports the Axis of Resistance and works to silence journalists who document Israeli and US war crimes in the region.

Western censorship often targets non-hegemonic news organizations like PressTV and RT.

Last year, a leak of internal Twitter files offered evidence that the Pentagon collaborated with Twitter to wage a secret PsyOps campaign across West Asia to sway public opinion in favor of Washingtons military interests in the region.

The Guardian published an op-ed by Peter Beinart defending the decision by several members of the Corbyn-wing of the US House of Representatives, including Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, to boycott Israeli President Isaac Herzogs speech to a joint session of Congress today. The protest is meant to express their opposition to what they dishonestly call Israeli apartheid.

The piece (Why progressives like AOC are right to boycott Israeli President Isaac Herzog, July 18), makes the argument that Herzog, the former head of Israels Labor Party, is just as racist and oppressive towards Palestinians as those on the Israeli far-right.  Among the examples Beinart points to, as putative examples of Herzogs villainy, are his support for Israels security fence, his visits to Israeli communities across the Green Line, and even the fact that he denounced Ben & Jerrys initial decision to cease selling its ice cream to settlements.

But, its in the following paragraphs where Beinart the former liberal Zionist turned anti-Zionist shows his true colours:

But even when Herzog has argued for territorial withdrawal, hes often done so in the language of Jewish supremacy. In about a decade, he warned in 2015, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean will be a majority and the Jews a minority. Israel must therefore divest itself of West Bank Palestinians because I dont want 61 Palestinian MKs in...

Gaza's power cuts leave Palestinians sweltering amid rising temperatures

The BBC News website has to date published seven written reports relating to the July 3^rd/4^th counter-terrorism operation in Jenin. Seeing as those reports will remain online as what the BBC describes as permanent public record that is in the public interest, the way in which the background to and reasons for that operation are portrayed in those reports is clearly worthy of review.

The context to that operation includes a rise in violence that began some two years ago with collaboration between known terrorist organisations and the formation of the Jenin Battalion (BBC portrayal of which was previously discussed here), Additional factors include the failure of the Palestinian Authority to exert control over areas, including Jenin, supposedly under its administration and the rise in the number of PA security forces personnel taking part in terrorism and violence. A particularly significant element of the picture is the...

Jewish American groups say Herzog in US a palatable cover for Israeli violence

Israeli forces raze four water wells in Masafer Yatta, south of Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank [Ihab Alami/ApaImages]

MEMO | July 18, 2023

Israels water company Mekorot has this month reduced the water supply to the occupied West Bank cities of Hebron and Bethlehem, causing severe shortages for Palestinians, Quds Press reported yesterday.

Mohammad Al-Jaabari, a Palestinian from Hebron, said he has to wait for days in queues until he gets his turn to get a tank load of water for his house.

However, he told Quds Press while looking at the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, we see the settlers play with water, irrigate their trees and home gardens.

Al-Jaabari said: This is unfair, but who can deter the Israeli occupation in order to stop its unfair distribution of water?

Hebrons Deputy...

Herzog's US visit designed to showcase Democrats' uncritical support of Israel

White House says Biden-Netanyahu meeting to take place in US, 'likely in fall'

A Guardian article reports on an exhibition at Kettles Yard in Cambridge, titled Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery, which is described as the first major exhibition of Palestinian embroidery in the UK for over three decades.

The piece (Rebellious robes and stitches from the civil war: the radical story of Palestinian embroidery, July 16), written by Safi Bugel, includes the following:

As much as the history of Levantine embroidery is one of female resistance and labour, the exhibition includes embroidered objects made by men held as political detainees in Israeli prisons, who use the medium to express both national pride and affection for their family members.

For years, weve been documenting the egregious anti-Israel bias of The Times former Middle East correspondent Catherine Philp, However, a report she published yesterday was so biased, and so clearly coloured by her own pro-Palestinian views, that it hardly can be called journalism.

The putatively straight news article published on July 9 was titled Palestinian boy killed by Israeli sniper in Jenin was unarmed, CCTV suggests, but, as her tweet of the article shows, it seems to have been motivated by her frustration with the fact that there hasnt been one confirmed civilian death during Israels two-day anti-terror operation in Jenin last week.

While the article begins by suggesting that a Palestinian in Jenin named Abdulrahman Hasan Ahmad Hardan was unarmed when he was shot by soldiers, it then proceeds to claim that he was an uninvolved civilian, and not a terrorist as was reported.

Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Militant groups such as the relatively new Jenin Brigades, Islamic Jihad and the armed wing of Fatah have little compunction about claiming non-combatants, even unarmed women and children, as their martyrs. Militants brought banners to the house celebrating him as such; his family expressed their unhappiness at that at not inconsiderable risk to themselves but they were adamant: Abdulrahman was not a militant and did not belong to any armed group.

[His mother] wept as she described rushing to Jenin after learning that her son had been shot in the head. He died five hours later in surgery. He was an ordinary boy, he was not a terrorist like they are saying, his mother said.

When Islamic Jihad posted photographs of its claimed martyrs, A...

Visitors to the BBC News websites live page covering the two-day counter-terrorism operation in Jenin on July 3^rd and 4^th learned that hours after that operation had begun, Jeremy Bowen flew to Israel, perhaps in expectation of a somewhat longer round of conflict.

Bowens uninformative July 4^th filmed report from outside the Khalil Suleiman government hospital in Jenin was also posted on the BBC News websites Middle East page under the headline The scene at the hospital near Jenins refugee camp.

Another report filmed at the same hospital appeared on the BBC News websites Middle East page under the headline Stones thrown and tear gas fired near Jenin hospital. That report, which shows a large group of Palestinian males some throwing stones gathered outside the hospital, was also promoted on the live page, together with an...