Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

IDF: 1250 truckloads of aid this week to Gaza, 200 to the UN. UN: Almost zero. The media only reports UN figures, not Israel's.

There have been many, many articles about the problems of bringing aid into Gaza.

Reuters reported on Tuesday:

Food and medicine for Palestinians in Gaza are piling up in Egypt because the Rafah crossing remains closed and there has been no aid delivered to a U.N. warehouse from a U.S.-built pier for two days, U.N. officials warned on Monday.

Senior U.N. aid official Edem Wosornu said there were insufficient supplies and fuel to provide any meaningful level of support to the people of Gaza as they endure Israel's military onslaught against Hamas militants.

"We are running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza. We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth. It is all of these, and worse," she said.

The New York Times adds:

The temporary [US] pier is one of few remaining entry points for aid shipments after Israel’s incursion into Rafah, in southern Gaza, earlier this month in response to a Hamas rocket attack that killed four soldiers on May 5. Israel not only seized the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt but also closed the Kerem Shalom crossing into Israel. Those were the two main entry points for truck convoys carrying aid overland.
Though Israel has since reopened Kerem Shalom, only 69 trucks have entered Gaza through it in the past two weeks, according to U.N. data. That is far fewer than the number of aid trucks that were entering through the two southern border crossings before Israeli troops went into Rafah. That number peaked at 340 trucks a day.

Here is UNRWA's chart showing the number of trucks that entered Gaza through the two crossings since May 5:

But for all the coverage of the supposed shortage of trucks going into Gaza, international media completely ignores what the IDF's COGAT unit is saying is happening.

According to COGAT, 451 trucks of aid entered Gaza on Tuesday, 403 on Monday and 422 more on Sunday.

If that is true, Israel is bringing in more trucks now than ever before since October 7.

Isn't that sort of important?

UNRWA's statistics do not include any aid that arrives through the newer crossings Israel opened, Erez West, Erez East and Gate 96.

And COGAT says that it transferred 200 trucks of aid to the UN on Monday:

The stories are not only inconsistent, they are seemingly contradictory. If the UN is receiving and distributing aid from the northern Gaza crossings, then UNRWA is being deceptive in implying that the UN is not receiving anything.

But what is really insane is that the media is not mentioning COGAT's claims at all. Which indicates that COGAT is telling the truth, and the truth contradicts the holy Narrative of Israel blocking aid to Gaza. You could be sure that if COGAt were lying, there would be reporters all over the place to expose how evil the IDF in misleading everyone.

And we see that in the news coverage all the time. Look again at the New York Times article above, implying that Israel closed Kerem Shalom for an extended period. Yet it was only closed for three days. Egypt has refused to send some 650 truckloads of aid rotting in the hot sun in Egyptian Rafah through Kerem Shalom. Even a US official gingerly noted that on Tuesday:

A senior Biden administration official briefing reporters offers very rare criticism of Egypt over what they said was Cairo’s withholding of UN humanitarian assistance from Gaza.
What should be going into Kerem Shalom is the UN assistance, which is now in Egypt. Egypt is holding that back until the Rafah crossing situation settles out,” the senior administration official says.
“We do not believe that aid should be held back for any reason whatsoever. Kerem Shalom is open. The Israelis have it open. And that aid should be going through Kerem Shalom,” the official adds.

We all know this but it took weeks to for any official to mention what everyone knows and barely criticize Egypt. And the media has been all but silent on Egypt's refusal to send aid.

The news media is well aware of COGAT. They quote them for other information all the time. Their refusal to report COGAT's statistics that show that not only has aid been entering Gaza, but more aid than before the Rafah invasion, can only be because the media doesn't want the world to know anything but anti-Israel lies.

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05/21 Links Pt2: Biden NSC Advisor: We Can't Go Against Israel until Reelection; VDH: The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus; The BBC is spreading dangerous lies

From Ian:

Israel Doesn’t Need Better ‘Hasbara’ It needs better friends

None of this is to suggest that pro-Israel Democrats should all jump ship and become Republicans. If an individual finds himself on the political left for whatever reason, he can be a good ally by pushing the Israeli cause within the Democratic Party. Figures like John Fetterman, Ritchie Torres, and Eric Adams have been important allies throughout this conflict. Democrats like these will always be facing somewhat of an uphill battle going forward given the basic moral and intellectual commitments of the modern left. But political parties generally aren’t known for always being logically consistent across all issue areas, so to the extent that a pro-Israel left can still exist, we should hope that it does.

All of this is to say that the best thing individuals can do to shape public opinion in Israel’s favor is to be more confident and assertive allies.

This involves not granting the premise of moral equivalency between Israelis and the Palestinians. A nation defending itself and inflicting collateral damage is not the same as a movement with exterminationist goals, which seeks to slaughter innocent people as an end in itself. And it is fine to say, based on everything else we know, that the Israeli government is more credible than Hamas when the truth about an incident or aspect of the war, like whether Israel is targeting innocent journalists, is in dispute.

From a broader perspective, friends of Israel must push back on any ideology that emphasizes Western wickedness and identity politics, of which hostility to the world’s only Jewish state must be a byproduct, made all the more powerful in international forums due to the way it resonates with the Third World. Join the struggles against DEI bureaucracies, fake academic fields based on an oppression-centered view of the world, and a far-left takeover of the Democratic Party. These larger battles will, more than any hasbara operation narrowly focused on Gaza, ultimately determine whether Israel can in the coming years continue to count on the United States as an ally.

The war in Gaza has captured the attention of the world because Israel, due to the kinds of tragic choices it must make, has emerged as the main avatar of Western civilization. This is one thing that the campus left gets correct. Throughout human history, most peoples have accomplished nothing most of the time, sulking in poverty, stagnation, tyranny, and sloth. Just as the United States forged a new civilization out of a wilderness, 75 years ago a people that had been stateless for over two millennia took over a small strip of land that had practically no natural resources, all the while being surrounded and outnumbered by hostile neighbors. Yes, in both stories, atrocities and injustices were committed along the way. But this is fundamentally less important than what these nations have accomplished and the necessity of making sure they continue to survive and prosper. As recent campus protests have made clear, the left sees these connections and knows what the stakes are. Israel and its allies must similarly understand that the real public relations battle is a struggle over the metanarrative of Western civilization.

In the Wake of October 7: Reflections on the American Jewish Community

Since Oct. 7, American Jews are experiencing a fundamental repositioning of not only how they see themselves but also how others perceive them. It includes seismic shifts in their relationship to Israel, how they form political alliances, and their way of being Jewish in a world that feels scarier, lonelier, and, in some surprising ways, more Jewish than ever.

This spring, American Jews awoke to a coordinated assault on American universities as pro-Palestinian groups orchestrated a set of demonstrations and demands designed to remove U.S. involvement with Israel and to disengage higher educational institutions from any academic or financial connection with the Jewish State. With their distortions of Zionism, misrepresentations of Judaism, and outright dismissal of the Jewish people, these players are attempting to rewrite the Jewish narrative concerning who we are and what we represent.

These activists seek to deny both our presence in the land of Israel and our historic connection to this holy space. Our opponents in this moment are calling for our genocide, comfortably aligning themselves with those in prior periods who were committed to seeking our demise.

American Jews Overwhelmingly Support Israel in a War Imposed upon It by Genocidal Forces Seeking Its Destruction

Liberal Jewish voters consider President Biden a longtime friend. At the same time, they are troubled by the growing influence of anti-Israel forces in the Democratic Party. They view Mr. Biden's freeze on sending some weapons to Israel as evidence of capitulation to a radical fringe.

American Jews overwhelmingly support Israel. Most consider the Jewish state an important component of their identity. They distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and hatred of the Jewish state. Contrary to the impression the media often gives, anti-Zionist Jews are few, a marginal part of the American Jewish community.

Judaism hates war and American Jews share the world's concern for Palestinian civilians. Revenge is for God, not human beings. We are prohibited even to rejoice in the deaths of enemy combatants, let alone civilians. Still, most American Jews understand that the West's nearly exclusive focus on Palestinian casualties - the result of a war that Gaza's own government launched - distorts reality.

This war was imposed on Israel by genocidal forces seeking its destruction. Oct. 7 revealed what is in store for Israel if these forces win. If Hamas defeats Israel, its Islamist supporters will come for us in Europe and America. Most Americans understand this and support Israel over Hamas by huge margins.

Since Oct. 7, American Jews understand much better the nexus between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. With the explosion of antisemitism in America, it is clearer to us than ever why there must be an Israel. We now realize that in most cases anti-Zionism constitutes, or leads inevitably to, antisemitism.

New poll shows Americans - including young Americans - support Israel in Gaza more than the White House and the media do

A new Harvard/Harris poll asks a number of questions about the current Gaza war and the day after, and even the youngest voters are much more pro-Israel than the media would have us believe.

62% of 18-24 year olds think Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.

This is a surprising result from the 18-24 crowd ; 61% say Israel should move forward with an operation in Rafah to finish the war with Hamas, doing its best to avoid civilian casualties even though there will be casualties.

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05/21 Links Pt1: Courting infamy; A judicial pogrom; Benny Gantz’s Big Gamble; Poll: Americans Continue to Strongly Support Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Courting infamy

So why did such a man trash what was left of the court’s reputation by turning a court that is a supposed bulwark against tyranny into a weapon to punish a democracy for defending itself against genocide?

The answer is surely that Khan, a former member of a “human rights” barristers’ chambers in London, subscribes to “human rights” culture. And in recent years international “human rights” law — which, when it was developed in the middle of the last century to protect powerless minorities, some presciently warned would turn into a politicised weapon against the Jewish people — has indeed developed into a weapon to demonise, delegitimise and destroy the State of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. “Human rights” culture today is suffused with hatred of Israel and has thus played a major role in poisoning the progressive west against it.

Defensively, Khan says he has consulted a panel of “impartial” lawyers. Yet this panel contains a number of radical “human rights” lawyers who are no friends of Israel.

One of them, Danny Friedman KC, is a barrister at the radical Matrix Chambers. On November 18 last year he wrote:
Israel’s response to the attack on its territory has involved catastrophic mass fatality and untold human suffering of Palestinians — not only as a result of aerial and ground bombardment, but through, among other features, cessation of basic sustenance and amenities, destruction of medical facilities, and forced movement of populations within the blockaded geography of the Gaza strip. These are also grave war crimes… it is difficult to see from a legal point of view how the continuation of military action in Gaza at this time would be concordant with international law.

In a speech he gave to a fundraising dinner for Medical Aid for Palestine, he said a ceasefire was now “a matter of legal imperative”. These were hardly the views of someone who brought an open mind to the ICC’s deliberations.

Another panel member was the veteran barrister Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws KC. Her website says she is president of Medical Aid for Palestinians. Last October, she warned against “collective punishment” by Israel and referred to Gaza “being reduced to rubble”. She said only token amounts of aid were being allowed in and accused Israel of cutting off Gaza’s water supplies.

In a speech on genocide in the House of Lords in March, she said:
The current conflict between Hamas and Israel follows decades of terrible conduct, by both the IDF and Hamas, before, during and after 7 October.

Rub your eyes. In the view of this doyenne of “human rights,” Israeli soldiers who died in great number as they desperately tried to fight off the Hamas stormtroopers even while they were continuing to perpetrate that depraved and barbaric pogrom against Israeli women, children and men, were guilty of “terrible conduct”.

This “impartial” panel is actually a hanging jury from the Salem school of law: verdict first, evidence nowhere.

Khan’s attack against Israel — with the panel of lawyers he assembled serving as his human shield against criticism — represents yet another onslaught of defamation, demonisation and delegitimisation mounted by the apparatus of international law against the Jewish state, a unique and malicious double standard applied to no other country on earth.

Far from restoring the ICC’s reputation, Khan’s move will now bury it in the eyes of all fair-minded and decent people.

It will also hammer a nail into the coffin of human rights law, the legal instrument of the international “humanitarian” establishment of the UN and anti-Israel non-governmental organisations for which this kind of “lawfare” has become a principal weapon aimed at Israel’s destruction.

Doubtless under enormous pressure from both the UN and his former chums in Britain’s radical barrister sets, Khan’s preposterous move is part of the agenda for Israel’s destruction through a pincer movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human rights” lawfare.

The beneficiary will be Hamas; the victims will be Israel, the rule of law and civilisation itself.

Arsen Ostrovsky: The ICC has perverted the very meaning of justice

Yesterday was a dark day for justice.

The announcement by the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim Khan that he is pursuing arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant alongside the leaders of Hamas is an egregious and unconscionable perversion of the law, and a gift to the murderers and rapists of October 7 - one which Yahya Sinwar could never have imagined in his wildest dreams.

That Khan would even utter Israel and Hamas in the same breath is simply unfathomable.

There is absolutely no comparison between a genocidal terrorist organisation like Hamas and a democratic state like Israel, seeking to defend its citizens and rescue its hostages, following the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

To draw such equivalence, which is no different to equating Churchill and Hitler, is abominable and morally repugnant.

The ICC was established in 2002 as a “court of last resort” to end impunity for the perpetrators of the most heinous of crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide - not the Orwellian circumstances of arresting Israeli leaders for responding to the pogrom of October 7.

Notwithstanding the heinous crimes inflicted upon the Jewish state, which continue to this day with the holding of 128 hostages in Gaza and ongoing rocket attacks, the IDF has gone to unprecedented lengths - not seen until now in the history of modern warfare - to abide by the laws of war and avoid harm to Palestinian civilians.

As a court of last resort, the ICC is governed by the principle of “complementarity”, meaning it may only assert jurisdiction in circumstances where a national legal system fails to act, or to do so in a bona fide manner.

Khan himself stated during a visit to Israel after the October massacre that “Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders and a robust system intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law.” How quickly has Khan forgotten his own words.

Brendan O'Neill: A judicial pogrom

The Clooney vision of the ICC and its brainy advisers as gallant defenders of decency is a grotesque lie. Clooney, in her statement, says ‘I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s’. Big words from a barrister who’s advising prosecutors for a court that is notoriously selective in which wars it investigates and which wars it leaves alone. So Israel is threatened with being dragged to The Hague, but Bashar al-Assad was not, despite overseeing a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Neither were Saudi leaders over their killings in Yemen. And this isn’t to mention Western leaders – in the US, Britain, France – whose warmongering has caused far greater death and destruction in the Middle East than Israel ever has. I would really like to ask all those legal eagles why killings by the Jewish State seem to cause them greater angst than killings by ‘white’ states.

The ICC is infamous for its disproportionate targeting of the leaders of black Africa. To see a map of ICC investigations is to behold neo-imperialism in all its shameless pomposity. Most of its investigations have been in Africa, with a smattering in Latin America and Asia. No wonder the African Union has advised African states to cut ties with the ICC on the basis that it is a ‘neo-colonial force seeking to further empower Western political… interests in Africa’. That ‘anti-racist’ leftists are now cheering a court, riddled with racist double standards, because it has lumped the Jews in with the blacks is a testament to how fried their brains have become as a result of Israelophobia. Even the neo-colonial powers of the postwar globalist order are treated as allies by the woke left, as ‘good guys’, if they make moves against Evil Israel.

There’s a special cruelty to the seeking of arrest warrants against the Jewish State. The ICC has its origins in the postwar discussion about the need for ‘international law’ to deal with criminals like the Nazis. So grave were the crimes of fascism against the Jews that new legal systems are needed to punish such crimes, the argument went. Eventually, the ICC emerged. Fast forward to 2024 and this court that was founded on the principle that fascistic murder must never again go unpunished now threatens to punish a state whose only crime was to fight back against fascistic murderers. The postwar ideal of protecting the likes of the Jews is now weaponised against the Jews. The seeking of arrest warrants against Israel is a grotesque betrayal of the promises and principles of the entire postwar era. It is the self-negation of everything the modern, liberal West claims to represent.

I see it as a judicial pogrom, to go alongside the militant pogrom launched by Hamas and the intellectual pogrom pursued by Hamas’s apologists in the West. Militarily, politically and now legally, the Jewish State is under attack. We are fast reaching a situation where it isn’t only Israel’s military actions that are viewed as crimes against humanity but Israel itself. The Jewish homeland itself is this close to being redefined as a crime. This should be intolerable to anyone who believes in nationhood, self-determination and the equal right of Jews to go after the armies that butcher their people. Screw the ICC. It should enjoy no jurisdiction over Israel or any other independent nation.

Eli Lake: Israel Is Not Equivalent to Hamas

In the coming weeks there is a very good chance that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, will be pursued by the International Criminal Court as a wanted man. On Monday, the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, applied for an arrest warrant for Israel’s leader and its defense minister, Yoav Gallant.

That Netanyahu and Gallant’s warrant applications were announced alongside warrants for three Hamas leaders responsible for the October 7 massacre is the first of many flaws in this disgraceful case. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was right when he called the equivalence of Israel with Hamas “shameful.”

Then there’s the fact that Israel is not a party to the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, or ICC. Blinken said that “the United States has been clear since well before the current conflict that ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter.” Finally, Blinken noted “deeply troubling process questions.” Israel has said it was willing to cooperate with the court and that Khan had been due to visit Israel next week. Instead he abruptly announced his application for a warrant, which “call[s] into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation,” Blinken said.

But even assuming Khan is waging a credible, legitimate prosecution, there is another problem with the case. Khan’s central accusation against Israel is that the Jewish state has “intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of objects indispensable to human survival.” That is a crime under international law. And Khan argues in a press statement that Israel has used “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” to collectively punish Gaza’s 2.3 million people and to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it captured on October 7.

We have heard many accusations of starvation over the course of this war, but there has been scant evidence. (According to The Wall Street Journal, over the past seven months Hamas claims that 31 Gazans have died because of malnutrition and dehydration.) More, the ICC ignores abundant evidence that Hamas is hoarding the food and medical aid meant for the population it purports to govern. As the U.S. military was building a pier in Gaza to deliver aid last month, Hamas fired mortar rounds at the construction area. The Israel Defense Forces have posted many videos and photographs of Hamas gunmen commandeering aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). On May 2, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller acknowledged that Hamas was diverting aid.

Avraham Shalev at the Kohelet Forum makes a very good point:

Since Prosecutor Khan has re-entered the fray, he has made several statements indicating that he intends to put the burden of proof on Israelis to demonstrate their innocence against any allegations. Speaking in Cairo on October 30, 2023, Khan claimed it is the responsibility of Israel – which as he knows does not accept the Court’s jurisdiction to
“demonstrate that any attack, any attack that impacts innocent civilians or protected objects, must be conducted in accordance with the laws and customs of war, in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.They need to demonstrate the proper application of the principles of distinction, precaution and of proportionality. And I want to be quite clear so there’s no misunderstanding: In relation to every dwelling house, in relation to any school, any hospital, any church, any mosque – those places are protected, unless the protective status has been lost. And I want to be equally clear that the burden of proving that the protective status is lost rests with those who fire the gun, the missile, or the rocket in question.”
Khan’s statement implies that Israel is guilty until proven innocent. It also flies in the face of the principle that decisions by military commanders are evaluated based on the (often-limited) information available to them at the time of decision. Due to the difficult circumstances and intense pressure (“fog of war”), courts worldwide are reluctant to second guess the decisions taken by commanders.

In the same speech, Khan noted that Israel has “military advocate generals and a system that is intended to ensure their compliance with international humanitarian law. They have lawyers advising on targeting decisions.” Given that Khan acknowledges that the Israeli army has built-in mechanisms to protect civilians, it is unclear why Khan ascribes to Israel malicious intent until proven innocent. Khan has not demanded such a standard in any other conflict.

This is exactly right. The standard of determining proportionality, to calculate whether an attack would justify the expected amount of collateral damage, is whatever a "reasonable military commander" would do given the information available to him or her at that point in time (not in hindsight.) That standard was originally noted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and has been used by sources as disparate as Israel's High Court and Human Rights Watch as normative law.

The principle of distinction between military and civilian objects is similar. As I wrote in 2014:

It is ultimately up to the commander to determine the nature of the specific, fluid situation. Everything hinges on his or her intent - not on the judgment of other observers and not on finding out better information in hindsight. As stated by Rüdiger Wolfrum and Dieter Fleck in The Handbook of International Humanitarian Law, "The prerequisite for a grave breach (of IHL) is intent; the attack must be intentionally directed at the civilian population or individual civilians, and the intent must embrace physical consequences."

In order to find that the commander has committed a war crime, the bar is set quite high. ICRC commentary on art 85 of the Additional Protocol states:
The accused must have acted consciously and with intent, i.e., with his mind on the act and its consequences, and willing the ("criminal intent" or "malice aforethought"); this encompasses the concepts of "wrongful intent" or "recklessness"....
As long as the IDF did not deliberately attack civilians, and the local commander had a military purpose for each target based on the best information available at the time, there is no violation of the principle of distinction.

The ICC prosecution turns these well known legal concepts on their heads. Israel is assumed to be targeting civilians unless proven otherwise, it is assumed not to be concerned about civilian casualties unless proven otherwise.

It is assumed guilty and must prove its innocence, a much, much higher standard for the law than is applied anywhere else.

One can assume Hamas' malicious intent and desire to attack civilians. It admits it (ironically, by claiming that every Israeli man, woman and child is a military target.) No one can roam through the devastation of the Nova music festival and think otherwise.

But as even Khan admits, "Israel has a professional and well-trained military. They have, I know, military advocate generals and a system that is intended to ensure their compliance with international humanitarian law. " But instead of using this as a reason to assume that Israel's army regulates itself to adhere to international law, he uses Israel's professionalism as a liability, requiring it to prove each individual attack out of thousands of them adhere to its own policies - something that no army has ever been required to do.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that he's looking for reasons to find Israel guilty. If Israel proves its military decisions were proper 99.9% of the time, that remaining 0.1% will be enough to convict the prime minister and defense minister.

Based on his own words, Khan is showing that the ICC has turned into a kangaroo court.

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Why Did Chief Prosecutor Khan Of The ICC Back Out Of His Meeting With The Israeli Government? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

On Monday, Karim Khan -- the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court -- announced he was going to seek arrest warrants for both Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in addition to the top three leaders of Hamas: Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh.

Netanyahu condemned the implied comparison of Israel with the Hamas terrorists, calling it part of the "new antisemitism" appearing on college campuses and now apparently making its way to the Hague. Biden called Khan's decision "outrageous." In Europe, opinions were divided.

Chief Prosecutor Khan took the unusual step of first announcing the charges on CNN. In an exclusive interview with Christiane Amanpour, he laid out the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant:

o Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Statute;
o  Wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
o  Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);
o  Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i);
o  Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity;
o  Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h);
o  Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k).

Announcing the indictments that way seems unusual. Globes reports that Khan has a sterling reputation:

Khan is very highly respected in the international legal community, and is considered professional, serious, and fair. He made his decision together with two advisers with high reputations whom he co-opted to his team in the past few months: US lawyer Brenda Hollis, and Andrew Cayley, formerly the chief military prosecutor in the UK.

But his appearance on CNN was more than an issue of a lack of professionalism.

According to Barak Ravid, Khan backed out of a planned trip to Israel to discuss the investigation with the Israeli government:

The Times of Israel also quoted Blinken, who referred to Khan's pulling out of the pre-arranged meeting without prior notice as provoking "deeply troubling process questions." Blinken continued:

Fundamentally, this decision does nothing to help and could jeopardize, ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would get hostages out and surge humanitarian assistance in, which are the goals the United States continues to pursue relentlessly.

This goes beyond international law and jurisdiction.

The Jerusalem Post suggests that either Israel's entry into Rafah or the harsh words from the US precipitated the actions of the ICC. But if so, why didn't the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the kidnapping of 240 hostages cause Khan to spring into action?

One of the issues surrounding whether the ICC has jurisdiction is the concept of complementarity, that the ICC is the court of last resort. Only when a nation's authorities are unwilling or unable to prosecute alleged war crimes can the ICC step in.

Khan addressed this directly:

Complementarity, however, requires a deferral to national authorities only when they engage in independent and impartial judicial processes that do not shield suspects and are not a sham. It requires thorough investigations at all levels addressing the policies and actions underlying these applications.

Is he claiming that Israel is failing to investigate these issues?

But Khan himself has admitted:

Israel has trained lawyers who advise commanders and a robust system intended to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law.

The State Department's May 10 report to Congress also pointed out:

Israel’s own concern about such incidents is reflected in the fact it has a number of internal investigations underway. At the same time, it is also important to emphasize that a country’s overall commitment to IHL is not necessarily disproven by individual IHL violations, so long as that country is taking appropriate steps to investigate and where appropriate determine accountability for IHL violations. As this report notes, Israel does have a number of ongoing, active criminal investigations pending and there are hundreds of cases under administrative review.

Is Khan claiming that such investigations only meet the complementary criteria if the country leader himself is being specifically investigated?

Regardless of his "professionalism," Chief Prosecutor Khan has already created questions about his objectivity in this case and whether he can rise above politics.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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Normally, any country that decides to accede to the International Criminal Court and the Rome Statute has to weigh the benefits of such a move with the risk that it could itself be subject to prosecution under the system.

But when the "State of Palestine" acceded to the ICC in 2015, it carried virtually no risk to itself - only potential reward.

As Nimrod Karin wrote at the time in Opinio Juris:

The question therefore becomes just how risky the Palestinian ICC bid really is, and how risky the Palestinians thought it was when they made it, and we can only speculate with regard to both of these questions. My educated guess here is that the ICC bid isn’t that much of a risk for the Palestinians, or at least that it’s not perceived as such by the Palestinians, least of all by the relevant decision-makers, i.e. Abbas and his concentric power circles of PA-PLO-Fatah. I think that by now it’s more than obvious that for that side of the Palestinian internal conflict the best possible scenario is an international cop stepping in to take care of Hamas. If Hamas leaders ever get indicted by the ICC, Abbas would be finally free of the whole unity charade, and at absolutely no internal political cost for him, because Abbas wouldn’t face the dilemma of whether or not to extradite suspects or accept external investigation – Abbas has no de facto authority or control whatsoever over either the suspects or the actual “scene(s) of the crime(s)”. This means that the “Abbas side” is not only strategically superior in this respect, but a free-rider;....this might not have been so easy for the “Abbas side,” if the new ad hoc declaration had stuck to the July 1, 2002 date for retroactive temporal jurisdiction – because this might have put some PA/PLO/Fatah leaders in the path of the ICC due to their activities during the Second Intifada.

The "State of Palestine" still tried to stack the deck even further of its accession against Israel. It granted the ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of "Palestine", including East Jerusalem, only since June 13, 2014.

Why that date? Because on June 12, 2014, Palestinians kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah in Gush Etzion, and the "State of Palestine" that the ICC claims to control that area didn't want that event to be subject to ICC prosecution where they might have had to detain and extradite the murderers.

That date itself is proof positive that the entire application to join the ICC was a sham. It is all to add rights to the Palestinian Authority leadership with zero responsibility; to give the impression of respecting international law while subverting its very purpose of treating everyone equally.

There was no justice involved - it was pure politics. There was no downside for the Palestinian dictator Mahmoud Abbas. It should have been recognized as such by the ICC and rejected at the time for its transparently hypocritical nature.

But it wasn't.

And that brings us to today, where an autocratic, corrupt ruler can act like a statesman who cares about justice while celebrating terror attacks and using international law not only to hurt Israel but also to hurt his internal enemy Hamas as well.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Western armies always had difficulty providing aid during wartime. Yet only Israel is accused of deliberately starving civilians.

Globes describes the ICC prosecution charges against Israel's Prime Minister and Defense MInister:

The prosecutor claims that there is evidence that the prime minister and the minister of defense committed the crimes of intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, extermination and/or murder, including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, and willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health, all of which are crimes under the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court.

Let's talk about "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare."

In 2009, the Obama administration started limiting humanitarian aid to Somalia, a country it engaged in regular airstrikes on, fearing that the aid will end up helping Islamist militants. A massive famine in that country that started shortly thereafter killed 260,000 by starvation - half of them children - and the US knew very well about this while it was happening. As the LA Times reported, there were many factors in the famine - but US withholding aid was one of them:

According to analysts, the deaths were caused by people and politics: the Islamist militia the Shabab, which denied humanitarian access to the hardest-hit areas and prevented starving people from leaving; local clan warlords, who stole food aid; and the transitional government in Mogadishu, the capital, whose officials diverted aid.

But American policy also played a considerable role, according to analysts, with the Shabab designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2008. U.S. counter-terrorism law imposes sanctions on any group found to be offering even indirect assistance to a terrorist group. Some U.S. and international agencies halted aid deliveries to Shabab-controlled areas, fearing they could be charged with helping a designated terrorist group. In January 2010, the World Food Program suspended aid to southern Somalia, after reports that the Shabab was diverting supplies.

Isn't it interesting that while everyone knows Hamas diverts aid, no one seems concerned that this violates sanctions against Hamas. But with Al Shabab, it caused the US and even the World Food Programme to stop sending aid - and this decision helped doom thousands, or tens of thousands.

Isn't it interesting that the 28 who the Gaza health ministry has documented of dying from starvation over seven months have received hundreds of times more media coverage than the 260,000 who starved to death in Somalia in two years.

The difficulty of providing aid to war zones was documented in the New York Times in 2003:

Many Iraqis were in need of decent food and clean water long before the first cruise missile was fired at Baghdad. But there were many more of them once the war began. Cities and villages have been cut off from fresh supplies, electricity and water pumps.

Civilians are suffering, and a debate has begun about who should control relief efforts. The Pentagon has said it wants to keep control over all humanitarian aid. But relief agencies, like Catholic Relief Services and Oxfam-America, have said they don't want to be part of a military effort, because they must be independent to do their jobs.

But staying independent is a challenge. In war zones, especially, the distribution of aid is an intensely political act, no matter how neutral a group tries to be. In 1994, humanitarian agencies in eastern Zaire found themselves helping not only women and children, but many Hutu men and boys who had participated in the genocide of more than 500,000 Rwandan Tutsis. In 1993 in Somalia, the warlords were able to convince their militias that the American military operation there was not a humanitarian intervention to combat famine but a military invasion; 18 American marines and at least 12 humanitarian workers were killed.

In the early 1990's in Bosnia, I first learned the rub-the-stomach language of want. Food is a military necessity; armies need it, and always get a slice of it, no matter the intentions of the donors. And if civilians can be fed by international aid agencies, well, that's one task a besieged government does not have to handle, and one more reason for it not to be concerned about hungry or thirsty people.

The angels of charity are only human, too. The invasion of Iraq had little support, and outright opposition, from some relief groups. They might not wish to engage in activities that strengthen the American occupation of Iraq; if providing food to areas no longer under Mr. Hussein's control is seen as part of that effort, or helps it by encouraging defections, the angels of mercy might be less aggressive in providing their mercy. But far more important for relief groups is the political bind they are in if they operate under, or are thought to operate under, military control: they may not be allowed to deliver aid to the people they wish to deliver it to, and they may become fair military targets for the other side. Last month, for example, a Red Cross worker in Kandahar, Afghanistan, was shot dead by a suspected group of Taliban.

Violence was a constant hazard for relief workers in Bosnia. Though officials of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees tried to retain their independence, traveling only with escorts from the United Nations peacekeeping force, their convoys were frequently shot at or looted, mostly by Serbs trying to starve Muslims (and occasionally Croats) into submission; drivers and other relief personnel were killed and injured.

In Iraq, Pentagon officials and Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, a retired army officer who is designated to take charge of the postwar reconstruction, do not wish, as the war still rages, to relinquish control of humanitarian operations. But the military, despite what officials in Washington might say, is not configured for or adept at distributing aid.

Even accepted international law says that there are exceptions to the rule of providing aid for the population - if that aid will strengthen the enemy. From the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 23:

Each High Contracting Party shall allow the free passage of all consignments of medical and hospital stores and objects necessary for religious worship intended only for civilians of another High Contracting Party, even if the latter is its adversary. It shall likewise permit the free passage of all consignments of essential foodstuffs, clothing and tonics intended for children under fifteen, expectant mothers and maternity cases.

The obligation of a High Contracting Party to allow the free passage of the consignments indicated in the preceding paragraph is subject to the condition that this Party is satisfied that there are no serious reasons for fearing:

(a) that the consignments may be diverted from their destination,
(b) that the control may not be effective, or
(c) that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy through the substitution of the above-mentioned consignments for goods which would otherwise be provided or produced by the enemy or through the release of such material, services or facilities as would otherwise be required for the production of such goods.

The Power which allows the passage of the consignments indicated in the first paragraph of this Article may make permission conditional on the distribution to the persons benefited thereby being made under the local supervision of the Protecting Powers.

Such consignments shall be forwarded as rapidly as possible, and the Power which permits their free passage shall have the right to prescribe the technical arrangements under which such passage is allowed.

The ICC is supposed to be objective - but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the intense media and NGO coverage of this war, overwhelmingly negative towards Israel, does not politicize it decisions.

When it isn't Israel at war, the media bends over backwards to understand the difficulty of distributing aid in a war zone. Israel faces many of the same challenges that other countries have during war - yet they are assumed to be using starvation as a method of war, despite spending so much time and money to facilitate aid beyond what is required by international law.

The bias and antisemitism are the only way to explain this. And I don't only mean the ICC - I mean the cumulative effect of the media, of NGOs, of gullible Westerners, or professional propagandists, of world governments who are eager to blame Israel for not solving problems that no one else has ever solved adequately in a war zone.

In fact Israel is doing more to feed Gaza than most Western democracies ever did to their enemies.

The double standards, driven by subconscious or conscious antisemitism, have got to stop.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/20 Links Pt2: Dershowitz: Are the Democrats betraying Israel?; 'The conflict began when Israel responded'; Colleges Are Capitulating to the ‘Tentifada’

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: What Happens When You Can’t Simply Arrest the Jews For Defending Themselves?

The morning after Easter Sunday in 1903, Yehiel Pesker went to his shop at the Kishinev market to inspect for damage. The previous day, the early rumblings of a pogrom had unsettled the city. On his way back home, he saw about 200 Jews armed with clubs and even a few guns—the second wave of one of history’s most notorious pogroms would come that day and Jews wanted to be prepared. When the pogromists came there was a standoff, until the police intervened against the Jews and the deadly violence continued.

Although these Jews merely presented a desire to defend themselves should they be attacked, and although this was one brief moment on the second day of a three-day blood-riot that would shock the world, “local antisemites and their sympathizers,” according to historian Steven J. Zipperstein, tried to argue that this was an escalation by the Jews and therefore the victims were really to blame for the pogrom. Elsewhere in town, a nearly 60-year-old Jewish man fought off four attackers, who then spread the rumor that a Jew had murdered Christians. For some, then, a literal blood libel in the middle of an extended massacre was transformed into the origin story of the whole riot.

“In arguments made by defense attorneys at the trials of pogrom-related crimes, Sunday’s rioting was dismissed as a ruckus that would quickly have come to an end… had Jews not overreacted,” writes Zipperstein. “In this version it was the all-but-unprovoked aggression of Jews and subsequent rumors of attacks on a church and the killing of a priest that set in motion the unfortunate but, under the circumstances, understandable violence.”

That all may sound ridiculous, because few pogroms are better known than Kishinev and because it had such a profound effect on history: It shaped the perspectives of important Zionist figures and it alarmed the world, even becoming an element of the civil-rights fight in America as an example of why racial and ethnic minorities needed protection from the state enshrined in law.

But leave out the names of people and places, and you’d be describing the response to Hamas’s October 7 massacre. The Jews had it coming; the attacks were essentially an act of self-defense; it would’ve been a minor event had the Jews not escalated by defending themselves.

Colleges Are Capitulating to the ‘Tentifada’

Harvard is only the latest elite school to promise to consider BDS measures. Colleges to have made that concession include:
Princeton, which will also consider new academic affiliations with Palestinian scholars, students, and institutions, and a new Palestinian studies course.
Northwestern, which has also committed to build a house for Muslim student activities and to fundraise for scholarships for Palestinian undergraduates.
Brown University, which agreed to vote on implementing BDS.
Rutgers, which agreed to accept at least 10 displaced Gazan students and hire additional professors who specialize in Palestinian and Middle Eastern studies.
Johns Hopkins, which will grant amnesty to all student protesters.
University of California, Berkeley, which agreed to ensure that their academic partnerships don’t exhibit anti-Palestinian discrimination, which protesters say is a “pathway to boycott of Israeli university programs.”
University of California, Riverside, which has committed to discontinue business school study programs in Israel. It also promised a “review of Sabra Hummus.”

Alan Dershowitz: Are the Democrats betraying Israel?

Biden is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. He claims to believe that Israel has the right and obligation to destroy Hamas, but at the same time he is denying them the ability to do so. This schizophrenic approach seems motivated more by politics than principle. Biden does not want to lose the growing part of his base that is becoming increasingly anti-Israel. At the same time he wants to maintain the votes of Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel.

More is at stake here than Michigan, with its several hundred thousand Arab and Muslim voters. There is Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and Nevada. Each of which, have numerous pro-Israel voters. The difference is that the anti-Israel voters have nowhere else to go. They won’t vote for Donald Trump under any circumstances. The worst they can do is to stay home, which is unlikely. Many pro-Israel voters, on the other hand, could vote for Trump, who has been strongly pro-Israel.

Pro-Israel voters are becoming deeply disillusioned with the Democratic Party. None of its leaders have been willing to condemn the Squad and its bigoted allies who are knee-jerk anti-Israel zealots. This includes Biden who has praised AOC. It also includes Nancy Pelosi who has posed with and praised the most antisemitic members of the Squad.

And then there is Bernie Sanders, who is among the most anti-Israel officials in the history of our nation. He votes with the hard socialist left on almost every issue relating to Israel. It is becoming harder and harder for pro-Israel voters to align themselves with the Democratic Party, and for good reason.

Until the Obama administration, Israel was generally a bipartisan issue. Obama was the first president to tilt the Democrats away from Israel, especially near the end of his second term. Biden seems determined to turn that tilt into a full-fledged push. We hope he does not do so, but if he does, he will do permanent damage to one of the most important and mutually beneficial alliances in the world today. It may also cost him the election.

Every year or so, Arabic media publish a conspiracy theory that there is a secret university in Tel Aviv that teaches Jews about Islam so they can become preachers in the Muslim world and corrupt Islam.

It's that time again.that time again.

What do you know about the Islamic University of Tel Aviv? Why do they only accept Jewish students who are granted a certificate from Mossad departments with the title “Islamic preachers?”

It was founded in 1956. Their mission is limited to going anywhere in the Islamic world with the title of an Islamic preacher. First, they receive studies in the history of Islam, the history of the prophets, the history of the Qur’an, and the sciences of the Abrahamic religions. Then they move to advanced stages in studying Shiite and Sunni jurisprudence. They focus on controversial points between Islamic sects.

Some of the students of this university have reached sensitive Islamic centers after the graduation of a number of scholarly cadres, and some of them were appointed to Arab and religious universities. They taught history and comparative jurisprudence in most Islamic countries. Their arena for reporting is in two important lines through which their thought is transmitted to the general public:

The first: young people who have no experience or culture. They inject into their minds a number of suspicions that require a scholar experienced in Islamic beliefs to answer them. Suspicions spread among university youth of both sexes, who are not armed with religious culture. At the same time, they are supported by websites opened from inside Tel Aviv that feed the idea and open fake stations and websites in the name of a person {Shiite or Sunni} who present programs that achieve the goal of dividing Muslims, thus deepening the rift between the ignorant and the semi-educated.

The second group that is relied upon are the religious cadres, because the Mossad needs an arena and cadres to spew the poisons of the people of Zion against the Qur’an and the religion of Muhammad {PBUH}, so some of the talismans or holders of higher degrees are chosen from among the Sunnis and Shiites who would sell their afterlife in this life. Or through civil organizations affiliated with the embassies of the United States of America and European countries in Arab countries. They are hosted in stations that represent evil, thus fostering and deepening division among Muslims, n exchange for money paid by the Israeli university.

I recently noticed one of the cadres at Tel Aviv Islamic University who had learned doctrines, intellectual principles, and comparative jurisprudence in religious branches. The preacher is Avichai Adraee, spokesman for the Israeli occupation army... During my follow-up of his talks, I found that the man carries a religious culture that qualifies him to be an informant for the Israeli university that taught him all the Islamic laws that some of our treacherous people from both groups do not know. As for the young people and some of those who are members of organizations bearing the title of civil society... they have fallen victim to the teachings of the Israeli university for teaching Islamic sciences.

This is a closed university, and they select professors with great precision, who have the mentality of determining which subjects are approved. Their mission is to raise difficult suspicions that arouse suspicion.

Usually these articles go on to say that whichever flavor of Islam is the enemy (Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS) studies at this fictional university.

And I had no idea Avichai Adraee Avichai Adraee was a preacher!

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

05/20 Links Pt1: Biden doomed the Palestinians to another generation of war; ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant; Palestinians Threaten to Attack US Troops

From Ian:

Jonathan Tobin: Biden doomed the Palestinians to another generation of war

Biden and the foreign-policy establishment have had ample opportunities in the last 30 years to try and fail to create a Palestinian state, as well as to see what happens when one allows Islamists to survive rather than to seek their complete defeat. That is not true of Chamberlain, who had not tried and failed at appeasing a totalitarian and antisemitic power before he futilely attempted to bring “peace in our time” to Europe by handing Czechoslovakia over to Hitler.

But Biden and the so-called foreign policy “wise men” drew all the wrong conclusions from their experiences.

They failed to understand that Israel’s goal in Gaza was not an Iraq-style counter-insurgency in which, as Fareed Zakaria wrote recently in The Washington Post, the IDF should have sought to “win the hearts and minds” of Gazans who had cheered the crimes of Oct. 7. Nor were they right when, as The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof claimed, that Israel couldn’t and shouldn’t defeat Hamas or finish them off in Rafah. Both lacked the self-awareness to realize that their advice had been a self-fulfilling prophecy that might ensure Hamas’s survival even when that didn’t have to be so.

If Biden and these foreign-policy pundits had a scrap of honesty, they would have admitted that their willingness to ignore the truth about the Palestinians’ refusal to give up their eliminationist goals was proven over and over in the 1990s by the failure of the Oslo Accords to bring peace. If they had drawn appropriate conclusions from the last three decades of peace processing in which the obstacle has always been Palestinian rejectionism—a lesson that the Trump administration had absorbed and that guided their successful efforts to craft the Abraham 2020 Accords—they might have charted a different course post-Oct. 7. At the very least, it wouldn’t have brought worse results than hamstringing Israel with Hamas now clearly at the apex of Palestinian politics and with the Palestinians believing that the destruction of Gaza notwithstanding, the terrorists have gotten international opinion behind them.

Instead, Biden and the leftist voters whose support he seeks have vindicated Hamas’s belief that no matter what Israel did in response, the terror group—and its cause of destroying Israel and killing its Jewish population—would benefit from the attacks. Indeed, as far as they were concerned, the more Palestinians who were killed in the war the terrorists started, the better. They were counting on international pressure and sympathy for their cause would outweigh any horror felt about the orgy of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction their “soldiers” and other Palestinians who followed in their wake had committed. And that is exactly what has happened.

International Criminal Court seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Monday will seek arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as for Hamas leaders.

The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant will include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Karim Khan told CNN‘s Christiane Amanpour.

Charges against Hamas terrorist leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar, chief Ismail Haniyeh and Al-Qassam Brigades armed wing head Mohammed Deif will include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention,” he said.

In a statement published following the CNN interview, Khan’s office said he had “reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant bear criminal responsibility for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed since Oct. 8, 2023, the day after Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the northwestern Negev.

However, “the independent judges of the International Criminal Court are the sole arbiters as to whether the necessary standard for the issuance of warrants of arrest has been met,” the statement noted.

A panel of three justices from the ICC’s Pre-Trial Division will now consider Khan’s application for the arrest warrants.

If the court in The Hague greenlights the warrants, it would constitute an “unprecedented antisemitic hate crime,” Netanyahu warned last month after reports surfaced of Khan’s intentions.

“The possibility that they will issue arrest warrants for war crimes against IDF commanders and government leaders is a scandal of historical magnitude,” stated the premier.

“Eighty years after the Holocaust, the international bodies established with the goal of preventing another Holocaust are considering denying the Jewish state its right to defend itself,” he continued.

Netanyahu noted that this marks the first time that a democratic country committed to international law is defending itself from accusations of war crimes while at the same time facing existential threats.

Ebrahim Raisi’s Iran was one of brutal repression

Given his reputation for lethal repression, Raisi’s election as president in 2021, succeeding the more moderate Hassan Rouhani, might seem surprising. But then this was an election in which the Iranian people played only a walk-on role. Iran’s theocrats, through the Guardian Council, effectively decided who was able to stand for president, weeding out any candidates who didn’t subscribe to their hardline Islamist position. As one of his nominal rivals put it, the regime had aligned ‘sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president’. Little wonder the majority of Iranians didn’t bother to vote at all, with turnout reaching a record low of just 49 per cent. Raisi wasn’t so much elected as appointed president by the powers-that-be.

In power, Raisi was everything his line managers could have wished. As Iran strengthened its alliances with Moscow and Beijing, Raisi combined anti-American posturing with anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bile. In 2022, he suggested that more research needs to be undertaken to prove that the Holocaust really happened, called Israel a ‘false regime’ and declared that ‘the only solution is a Palestinian state from the river to the sea’. Needless to say, within 24 hours of Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year, Raisi praised the terrorists for mounting ‘a legitimate defence of the Palestinian nation’. Which is one way to describe the slaughter and rape of hundreds of civilians.

Above all, President Raisi indulged in large-scale repression, eagerly subjecting Iranians to the ever harsher dictates of an Islamist regime. In the summer of 2022, he ordered the authorities to enforce the ‘chastity and hijab’ law. He described the growing numbers of Iranian women who weren’t wearing a veil in public as the ‘corruption’ of ‘Islamic society’. A few months later, Raisi’s crackdown on hijab-less women led to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. She was arrested and detained by the morality police for not wearing the veil. Three days later, she died in a hospital in Tehran.

News of Amini’s death prompted outrage across Iran. For weeks and months, young women and men from across the country gathered in the streets to burn hijabs and express their hatred of the ayatollahs. Raisi’s response was entirely in keeping with his record in every public office he had held. He cracked down hard. Hundreds were murdered by security forces. Many more were arrested, tortured and some were executed. All because they wanted more freedom. To think, speak and dress as they – and not the ayatollahs – saw fit.

Raisi was a vicious Islamist apparatchik, one all too willing to repress and murder his own people. Yet what was striking about his presidency is how little outrage it generated among Western progressive circles. They listened to his anti-Semitic spiels. They saw what he was willing to do to his own people, the lengths he was willing to go to force them to adhere to his regime’s intolerant demands. They saw those brave Iranian women and men try to stand up to the de facto Islamist dictatorship after Amini’s death in 2022. Yet aside from a few token gestures, no real solidarity was forthcoming. It’s almost as if brutal repression doesn’t count for as much, if it’s being conducted by one of the West’s implacable enemies.

As we absorb the news of the death of Ebrahim Raisi, we should remember his many victims – and the brave Iranian rebels who continue to risk it all in pursuit of a freer future.

Seth Frantzman: Raisi set the Middle East aflame but his death will not put out the fire

Iran’s foreign policy manoeuvres during the Raisi era enabled it to knit together closer ties with Russia and China, as well as to get China to broker reconciliation with Saudi Arabia. Raisi also attempted outreach to Egypt this past year.

All this was key to Raisi’s goal of isolating Israel. He wanted to empower Iranian proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as proxies in Iraq and Syria. These groups could be mobilised at a moment’s notice to attack Israel, the US or other countries. Raisi understood that many Arab states were tired of wars and extremism, having faced off against ISIS and been divided during the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Iran preyed on this preference for calm by Arab states.

Raisi and his regime moved systematically to increase Iranian ties with Arab states, while also encouraging the region to become closer to Russia and China. Meanwhile behind the scenes, groups like Hamas were plotting the October 7 attack.

The architecture he put in place will remain now he has gone. Close ties between China, Iran and Russia will continue. Drone exports and Iranian drone and missile threats will increase. Iran’s backing of Hamas has already led to a massive war and Iran’s goal is to keep that war going and keep its proxies attacking Israel. The longer the war drags on, the more Israel will be stuck fighting in Gaza and Lebanon, while Iran can increase its influence in the Gulf, Egypt and other places.

With Raisi and Amir-Abdollahian gone, Iran will fall back on the IRGC which controls much of the country behind the scenes. It is the IRGC that moves drones and weapons to groups like Hezbollah. The fires lit by Raisi that are consuming the region will continue to burn even though he has left the stage.