US/Israeli talks in Washington to plot offensive in Rafah

Peter Symonds

@SymondsWSWS, 25 March 2024

As the Israeli military is poised to escalate its genocide in Gaza with a long-planned offensive in the southern city of Rafah, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has left for talks in Washington with top US officials. Last Friday, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that the barbaric operation into the city crammed with 1.5 million Palestinian refugees will proceed.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Nov. 30, 2023. [AP Photo/Saul Loeb]

Amid ongoing international outrage and protests against the Israeli genocide, the Biden administration has expressed concerns about the Rafah offensive. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Netanyahu in Israel last Friday and warned that the operation “risks further isolating Israel around the world and jeopardising its long-term security.” Vice President Kamila Harris told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that any military operation into Rafah “would be a huge mistake” and dropped a hint that there would be “consequences” for Israel.

These meaningless expressions of concern are simply window dressing for behind-the-scenes talks that will focus on how, not if, the Israeli war in Gaza is going to reach a bloody climax in Rafah. The Biden administration, which regards the conflict as part of a wider war in the Middle East targeting Iran, has backed Israel to the hilt—politically, financially and militarily with the supply of huge quantities of arms.

Gallant’s comments prior to his departure only underscored the character of the upcoming talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. “During my visit, I will focus on preserving Israel’s qualitative military edge and on ways to achieve our common goals: victory over Hamas and returning the hostages home,” he said in a statement issued by his office.

As well as focussing on Israel’s “ability to obtain platforms and munitions,” Gallant signalled that he and US top officials would discuss the opening of a new military front in southern Lebanon against Iranian-backed Hezbollah. The conflict has been underway and escalating since the Israeli war in Gaza began, involving Israeli strikes deep inside Lebanon as well as in the border area with Israel. Tens of thousands have been displaced.

The top figures in the Zionist regime in Israel have been pressing for a military offensive against Hezbollah to drive its militia forces back from the border. “We will also discuss the need to return Israel’s northern communities to their homes, whether this is achieved via military action or via agreement,” Gallant said. Given that Israel knows that its demands for Hezbollah to pull back some 30 kilometres from the border are completely unacceptable, what will be discussed involves a dramatic escalation of the conflict into Lebanon.

The desperate situation for the Palestinians in Gaza only intensified on Sunday as the Israeli military stepped up its onslaught and Israeli authorities told the UN that the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, would no longer be allowed to send food convoys into northern Gaza. “As of today, UNRWA, the main lifeline for Palestine refugees, is denied from providing lifesaving assistance to northern Gaza,” UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote in a post on Twitter/X.

Lazzarini demanded that the restrictions be lifted, declaring: “This is outrageous & makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine… By preventing UNRWA to fulfill its mandate in Gaza, the clock will tick faster towards famine & many more will die of hunger, dehydration + lack of shelter. This cannot happen, it would only stain our collective humanity.”

The cynicism of the Biden administration’s expressions of concern for the plight of Palestinian refugees was underscored by its lack of funding for the UNRWA. The newly passed US foreign aid spending bills puts severe limits on funding for the UN agency until at least March 2025. Lazzarini emphasised the urgency for assistance declaring that humanitarian agencies were in a race against time to avoid famine. Any gap in funding would undermine access to food, shelter, primary health care and education at an extremely difficult time.

After visiting Egypt’s border with Gaza at the Rafah crossing on Saturday, UN Secretary General António Guterres reiterated his call for a ceasefire. “Looking at Gaza, it almost appears that the four horsemen of war, famine, conquest and death are galloping across it,” he said, adding that nothing justifies the collective punishment of Palestinians.

Having been at the border where some 7,000 aid trucks are waiting for Israeli approval to enter Gaza, Guterres declared that the starvation being inflicted on Palestinians was a “moral outrage”. He called on Israel to remove the “obstacles and chokepoints to relief,” saying: “Palestinians in Gaza desperately need what has been promised: a flood of aid… not trickles, not drops.”

Even before Gallant’s talks in Washington begin, the Israeli military is intensifying its assault in southern Gaza. The Israeli military carried out around 40 strikes in the al-Amal neighbourhood in Khan Younis to the north of Rafah while its troops were “encircling the area and continuing to eliminate” alleged Hamas militants. It also sent tanks into the al-Qarara area in northern Khan Younis, backed by airstrikes.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society reported on Sunday that Israeli forces were “besieging” al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis. It stated that the military was using bulldozers and smoke bombs around the hospital and demanding that everyone inside evacuate. A PRCS emergency services volunteer in the facility reported “intense and continuous shelling”, as well as “continuous gunfire.” He was later killed by Israeli gunfire.

In Gaza City, the Israeli siege of the al-Shifa Hospital continued on Sunday despite calls by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, on Thursday to halt the attacks that have cut off access to the facility. “We repeat once again: hospitals are not battlegrounds. They must be protected in line with international humanitarian law.” The Israeli military declared that it has detained 480 “suspects” for interrogation including health workers.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 32,226 people have been killed and 74,518 injured in Gaza since the war began. That figure will only increase dramatically as Israeli forces mount their offensive into Rafah.

Chris Hedges: Israel’s Trojan Horse

The “temporary pier” being built on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza is not there to alleviate the famine, but to herd Palestinians onto ships and into permanent exile.

By Chris Hedges, March 19, 2024

Piers allow things to come in. They allow things to go out. And Israel, which has no intention of halting its murderous siege of Gaza, including its policy of enforced starvation, appears to have found a solution to its problem of where to expel the 2.3 million Palestinians. 

If the Arab world will not take them, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken proposed during his first round of visits after Oct. 7, the Palestinians will be cast adrift on ships. It worked in Beirut in 1982 when some eight and a half thousand Palestine Liberation Organization members were sent by sea to Tunisia and another two and a half thousand ended up in other Arab states. Israel expects that the same forced deportation by sea will work in Gaza.

Israel, for this reason, supports the “temporary pier” the Biden administration is building, to ostensibly deliver food and aid to Gaza – food and aid whose “distribution” will be overseen by the Israeli military.  

“You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior aid official in the Biden administration, and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group told The Guardian. 

This “maritime corridor” is Israel’s Trojan Horse, a subterfuge to expel Palestinians. The small shipments of seaborne aid, like the food packets that have been air dropped, will not alleviate the looming famine. They are not meant to. 

Five Palestinians were killed and several others injured when a parachute carrying aid failed and crashed onto a crowd of people near Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp. 

“Dropping aid in this way is flashy propaganda rather than a humanitarian service,” the media office of the local government in Gaza said. “We previously warned it poses a threat to the lives of citizens in the Gaza Strip, and this is what happened today when the parcels fell on the citizens’ heads.”

If the U.S. or Israel were serious about alleviating the humanitarian crisis, the thousands of trucks with food and aid currently at the southern border of Gaza would be allowed to enter any of its multiple crossings. They are not. The “temporary pier,” like the air drops, is ghoulish theater, a way to mask Washington’s complicity in the genocide. 

Israeli media reported the building of the pier was due to pressure by the United Arab Emirates, which threatened Israel with ending a land corridor trade route it administers in collusion with Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to bypass Yemen’s naval blockade. 

The Jerusalem Post reported it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who proposed the construction of the “temporary pier” to the Biden administration. 

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who has called Palestinians “human animals” and advocated a total siege of Gaza, including cutting off electricity, food, water and fuel, lauded the plan, saying “it is designed to bring aid directly to the residents and thus continue the collapse of Hamas’s rule in Gaza.”

“Why would Israel, the engineer of the Gaza famine, endorse the idea of establishing a maritime corridor for aid to address a crisis it initiated and is now worsening?” writes Tamara Nassar in an article titled “What’s the Real Purpose of Biden’s Gaza Port?” in  The Electronic Intifada. “This might appear paradoxical if one were to assume that the primary aim of the maritime corridor is to deliver aid.”

When Israel offers a gift to the Palestinians you can be sure it is a poison apple. That Israel got the Biden administration to construct the pier is one more example of the inverted relationship between Washington and Jerusalem, where the Israel lobby has bought off elected officials in the two ruling parties.

Oxfam in a March 15 report accuses Israel of actively hindering aid operations in Gaza in defiance of the orders by the International Court of Justice. It notes that 1.7 million Palestinians, some 75 percent of the Gaza population, are facing famine and two-thirds of the hospitals and over 80 percent of all health clinics in Gaza are no longer operable. The majority of people, the report reads, “have no access to clean drinking water” and “sanitation services are not functioning.”

The report reads: 

The conditions we have observed in Gaza are beyond catastrophic, and we have not only seen failure by Israeli authorities to meet their responsibility to facilitate and support international aid efforts, but in fact seen active steps being taken to hinder and undermine such aid efforts. Israel’s control of Gaza continues to be characterized by deliberate restrictive actions that have led to a severe and systemic dysfunctionality in the delivery of aid. Humanitarian organizations operational in Gaza are reporting a worsening situation since the International Court of Justice imposed provisional measures in light of the plausible risk of genocide, with intensified Israeli barriers, restrictions and attacks against humanitarian personnel. Israel has maintained a ‘convenient illusion of a response’ in Gaza to serve its claim that it is allowing aid in and conducting the war in line with international laws.

Oxfam says Israel employs “a dysfunctional and undersized inspection system that keeps aid snarled up, subjected to onerous, repetitive and unpredictable bureaucratic procedures that are contributing to trucks being stranded in giant queues for 20 days on average.” Israel, Oxfam explains, rejects “items of aid as having ‘dual (military) use,’ banning vital fuel and generators entirely along with other items essential for a meaningful humanitarian response such as protective gear and communications kit.” Rejected aid, “must go through a complex ‘pre-approval’ system or end up being held in limbo at the Al Arish warehouse in Egypt.” Israel has also “cracked down on humanitarian missions, largely sealing off northern Gaza, and restricting international humanitarian workers’ access not only into Gaza, but Israel and the West Bank including East Jerusalem too.”

Israel has allowed 15,413 trucks into Gaza during the past 157 days of war. Oxfam estimates that the population of Gaza needs five times that number. Israel allowed 2,874 trucks in February, a 44 percent reduction from the previous month. Before Oct. 7, 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily. 

Israeli soldiers have also killed scores of Palestinians attempting to receive aid from trucks in more than two dozen incidents. These attacks include the killing of at least 21 Palestinians, and the wounding of 150, on March 14, when Israeli forces fired on thousands of people in Gaza City. The same area had been targeted by Israeli soldiers hours earlier.

“Israel’s assault has caught Gaza’s own aid workers and international agencies’ partners inside a ‘practically uninhabitable’ environment of mass displacement and deprivation, where 75 percent of solid waste is now being dumped in random sites, 97 percent of groundwater made unfit for human use, and the Israeli state using starvation as a weapon of war,” Oxfam says.

There is no place in Gaza, Oxfam notes, that is safe “amid the forcible and often multiple displacements of almost the entire population, which makes the principled distribution of aid unviable, including agencies’ ability to help repair vital public services at scale.” 

Oxfam blasts Israel for its “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” attacks on “civilian and humanitarian assets” as well as “solar, water, power and sanitation plants, UN premises, hospitals, roads, and aid convoys and warehouses, even when these assets are supposedly ‘deconflicted’ after their coordinates have been shared for protection.”

The health ministry in Gaza said Monday that at least 31,726 people have been killed since the Israeli assault began five months ago. The death toll includes at least 81 deaths in the previous 24 hours, a ministry statement said, adding that 73,792 people have been wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7. Thousands more are missing, many buried under the rubble.

None of these Israeli tactics will be altered with the building of a “temporary pier.” In fact, given the pending ground assault on Rafah, where 1.2 million displaced Palestinians are crowded in tent cities or camped out in the open air, Israel’s tactics will only get worse. 

Israel, by design, is creating a humanitarian crisis of such catastrophic proportions, with thousands of Palestinians killed by bombs, shells, missiles, bullets, starvation and infectious diseases, that the only option will be death or deportation. The pier is where the last act in this gruesome genocidal campaign will be played out as Palestinians are herded by Israeli soldiers onto ships. 

How appropriate that the Biden administration, without whom this genocide could not be carried out, will facilitate it.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication

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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.

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United Nations says Israel using “starvation as a method of war”

Andre Damon, WSWS. org, March 20, 2024

Israel’s withholding of food from the population of Gaza may be a deliberate effort to starve the population, the United Nations’ highest human rights official said Tuesday.

Palestinians crowd together as they wait for food distribution in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Nov. 8, 2023 [AP Photo/Hatem Ali]

In a statement, Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that “The extent of Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of aid into Gaza, together with the manner in which it continues to conduct hostilities, may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime.”

Türk’s comments come as the rate of starvation and malnutrition surges throughout Gaza’s imprisoned population of over 2 million.

According to Türk, “The situation of hunger, starvation and famine is a result of Israel’s extensive restrictions on the entry and distribution of humanitarian aid and commercial goods, displacement of most of the population, as well as the destruction of crucial civilian infrastructure.”

Asked to reply Tuesday to Türk’s statements that Israel may be using starvation as a “weapon of war,” US Department of State spokesman Vedant Patel replied, “That is not something that we have observed or witnessed.”

This absurd denial is contradicted by the reality of mass starvation imposed on the population of Gaza.

A separate report published Tuesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) partnership, the official global body designating starvation, found that “famine is imminent,” with a “major acceleration of deaths and malnutrition.”

The IPC assessment notes that 1.1 million people are expected to face catastrophic levels of hunger and risk famine in Gaza, the highest number of people in that category ever recorded since the beginning of the current classification system.

“This is the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger ever recorded by the Integrated Food Security Classification system—anywhere, anytime,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in a news briefing Monday.

Before Israel’s assault on Gaza, less than 1 percent of children in Gaza under five were acutely malnourished. But that figure has surged to between 12.4 and 16.5 percent.

The report concluded,“Famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.”

The report found that every single person in the Gaza Strip lives with some level of food insecurity. The report projected that while the entirety of the Gaza Strip is currently in the “emergency” phase of food insecurity, the entirety of Northern Gaza will be in famine within a matter of months.

Israel is imposing famine on the population of Gaza in a multitude of ways. The most visible is through the imposition of a blockade that denies humanitarian organizations the ability to provide food to starving people.

In a statement Tuesday, the office of the United Nations Secretary-General said that Israel had let in less than half of the humanitarian missions that the UN had planned to send to Gaza.

“During the first two weeks of March, less than half of planned humanitarian aid missions to northern Gaza were facilitated by the Israeli authorities—that’s 11 out of 24 missions,” the statement said. “The rest were either denied or postponed. Dispatching aid to the north of Gaza requires day-to-day approvals from Israeli authorities.”

The ongoing blockade is accompanied by the systematic and deliberate killing of aid workers. On Thursday, the Israeli military carried out the latest in its repeated attacks on the Kuwait Roundabout, where the remaining population of Gaza City goes to receive food aid.

Al Jazeera reported that 23 aid workers were killed in the latest strike, which local officials said was a targeted attack on food distribution workers.

This attack on food distribution workers was accompanied by a full-scale assault on Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, which the Israeli military said left dozens of people killed.

But even this bloodbath is just a downpayment on what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in store with the planned invasion of Rafah.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu said he made it “supremely clear” to US President Joe Biden in a telephone conversation that “we are determined to complete the elimination of these battalions in Rafah, and there’s no way to do that except by going in on the ground.”

Despite its rhetorical criticisms of Netanyahu’s plans to invade Rafah, where over one million people are sheltering, the Biden administration has made clear that it will continue to supply weapons and funding to Israel no matter what it does.

In a press briefing Monday, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said that “The president emphasized his bone-deep commitment to ensuring the long-term security of Israel.” Sullivan added, “Israel has a right to go after Hamas, the perpetrators of the worst massacre of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Israel has made significant progress against Hamas.”

Earlier this month, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump and one of his key advisors on Middle East issues, endorsed the prospect of expelling the population of Gaza from Palestine.

In an appearance at Harvard University, Kushner said it would be “possible” to get the population of Gaza “into Egypt…with the right diplomacy.” He also raised the prospect of displacing the population of Gaza into the Negev Desert in Israel, saying “the thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev. I would try to move people in there. I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.”

“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable,” Kushner said.

𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐅 𝐒𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐇𝐚𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟑,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚

The agency says many are suffering from malnutrition and do not ‘even have the energy to cry’

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, March 17, 2024

The UN’s child relief agency said on Sunday that over 13,000 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip and that many more could be dead under the rubble.

“Thousands more have been injured, or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be stuck under rubble,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell, according to Reuters. “We haven’t seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry has said over 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and has consistently stated that around 70% of the casualties are women and children.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin previously said over 25,000 women and children had been killed in Gaza, but the Pentagon walked his comment back, claiming he was talking about all Palestinians killed.

Russel said that she visited a hospital ward where children were suffering from severe malnutrition and said the place was quiet because “the children, the babies … don’t even have the energy to cry.”

Separately, the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, said one in three children under the age of two in Gaza is now acutely malnourished. “Children’s malnutrition is spreading fast and reaching unprecedented levels in Gaza,” UNRWA said. Children have already started to starve to death in Gaza, with dozens of malnutrition deaths already reported.

Despite the horrific situation and Israel’s continued restrictions on aid, the US is still providing unconditional military aid to support the slaughter and starvation campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza.

Western Powers could Stop the Gaza Genocide; instead they Cover it Up with “Humanitarian Aid”

Middle East Monitor 03/18/2024

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By Caroline Lund and Brendan Ciarán Browne | –

( Middle East Monitor ) – The ongoing genocide in Gaza has starkly exposed Western governments’ unequal and wholly selective application of international law whilst also managing to draw much-needed attention to the dysfunctional role that foreign donors and their development agendas play in the region.

Following Israel’s hitherto unproven allegations, suggesting that members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) played an active role on 7 October, over fifteen Western governments took the draconian decision to cease funding of the organisation’s life-saving programmes in Gaza. Erroneous food package airdrops have subsequently been the order of the day, with Western states dropping aid whilst simultaneously supplying the weaponry to the Israeli state that has been erasing the presence of a starving Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip.

As the US military prepares to build a pier off the shore of Gaza, with the alleged purpose of facilitating aid delivery, the weaponisation of humanitarian intervention has never been laid so bare. This is at the same time as thousands of trucks laden with aid for the people of Gaza, ready to deliver essentials amidst this ongoing man-made catastrophe, remain prohibited from entry by the Israeli authorities. With more than 1.1 million Palestinians facing emergency levels of food insecurity, the situation is growing beyond desperate by the day.

However, it must be remembered that this is not due to Western governments’ inability to act or intervene, but rather is due to an unwillingness to address the root causes of Palestinian suffering and oppression – a tendency that stems from decades-long application of a de-contextualised “business-as-usual” approach to humanitarian intervention. Since the emergence of an oxymoronically named the “peace process” and the decision to pursue a liberal “peace-building” agenda in the 1990s, one that centres Western intervention around the proclaimed goal of achieving a mythical two-state solution, development intervention in the region has been profoundly ineffective, despite high levels of fiscal support.

Democracy Now! Video: “Aid Workers Say Israel Must End Attack on Gaza, Open Aid Routes”

According to the UN, donors have consistently placed Israel’s territorial interests and purported security demands, as well as their own political goals, above the implementation of international law. Development aid in Palestine has, for decades, failed to be applied on an equal footing or on a perceived rights-based platform.

In order to try and achieve tangible “development results” despite the chronic and steadily deepening economic and democratic deficit in Palestine, organisations like the UN have started to apply a so-called “resilience framework”, a process that a number of scholars and practitioners have shown to be deeply flawed.

The recent decision to engage in tokenistic aid drops from the sky, despite the outcry from international humanitarian organisations arguing against their efficacy, is yet further evidence of a deeply problematic Western intervention strategy in Gaza. Many of these aid drops have ended up landing in the sea or, in fact, in parts of Israel, whilst others have failed to deploy their parachutes, killing Palestinian children on impact. This flawed and impotent intervention serves nothing more than a photo-op for the sponsors of this ongoing genocide, further dehumanising Palestinians living in Gaza.

The West’s sponsorship of the genocide in Gaza, in supplying weapons and political cover for Israel’s actions, alongside its engagement in ineffective humanitarian interventions that put Palestinian lives at further risk, is the perfect example of how it has treated the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians ever since the formation of the Israeli state in 1948.

In addition to extending the humanitarian crisis by months, building a “temporary” pier off the coast of Gaza for the purported delivery of aid could, in effect, work to facilitate “voluntary migration” out of the Strip. As both the US and Israel have failed to exert pressure on neighbouring Egypt to open its borders to Palestinians fleeing starvation and indiscriminate bombing, the pier will conveniently create an entry point into Gaza that does not border Israel. It is thus far from cynical to argue that these purported humanitarian interventions are anything other than a stalling tactic designed to allow the US and Israel time needed to achieve their ultimate political aims and objectives – an ethnically cleansed Gaza.

Using aid as a weapon against a besieged population amidst a genocide shames those in the international donor community and reveals their deep complicity in crimes against humanity. Development and humanitarian intervention in Palestine have long been a smokescreen, allowing for the ongoing oppression and dispossession of Palestinians whilst simultaneously presenting a sense of feigned concern to onlookers in the West. Foreign humanitarian intervention in Palestine has been catastrophic, and the time for a fulsome re-evaluation of the root causes of humanitarian need has long since passed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Filed Under: Israel/ Palestine, US Foreign Policy

About the Author

Unlocking the ‘Mystery’ – Ilan Pappé Writes In Memory of Aaron Bushnell

Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC, in protest against Israel’s genocidal war. (Image: Palestine Chronicle, via social media)

By Ilan Pappe – The Palestine Chronicle, March 14, 2024  

Hopefully, one day, in a liberated Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave young men and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in Palestine is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.

Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice for the sake of Gaza and Palestine became yesterday’s news too quickly.  

Aaron was a cyber defense operation specialist in the US Airforce and he died at the age of 25 from injuries sustained when he set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington.

The official US army and police conveyed their sympathy to the family, but nothing was mentioned about the background and the cause Aaron was willing to die for. 

At best, the incident was described as a ‘tragic event’. The Pentagon explained that Aaron’s protest was against the war in Gaza and ignored his main message, blaming the United States for being complicit in the genocide.

I hope most of us will not be content with the official response. If we are, it means we disrespect the brave outcry of this young man and, in that case, his sacrifice will be in vain.

It was no accident that Aaron Bushnell donned his military uniform and broadcast live his heroic act of sacrifice over the internet.

As “an active duty member”, he wrote, “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”.

‘Free Palestine’

This was his main message before dousing himself in a clear liquid and setting himself on fire, crying “Free Palestine”.

In the pre-action message, he wrote:

 “I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all.” 

I write this piece with trepidation, making sure it does not sound like encouragement for others to go to that extreme – but find it difficult not to admire Aaron’s bravery acknowledged by the resistance movement in Gaza that praised the American pilot who:

“Immortalized his name as a defender of human values and the plight of the Palestinian people, who are oppressed by the American administration and its unjust policies.”

An Important Message

Aaron’s message is simple and clear: the US is complicit in the first-ever televised genocide in modern times. And if you serve in the American administration or army, then you, too, are complicit.

The physical venue where the complicity is translated into actual collaboration is, indeed, the Israeli embassy in Washington, and this is why Aaron decided to protest there.

Other parts of Aaron’s message need to be repeated and echoed by many of us. 

He asked whether decent people should have been quiet during slavery in America, or during Apartheid in South Africa. Or everywhere in the world throughout history, when people sacrificed their lives in the struggle for justice? 

Aaron was unable to stop the American complicity in the genocide, but he hoped that it would not go unnoticed.

But it is not only the message of Aaron’s self-sacrifice that is so important. His persona was equally crucial.

Everyone who knew him remembered him for “his kindness, gentleness, thoughtfulness”. A friend told reporters that he was “the kindest, gentlest, silliest little kid in the Air Force” and “one of the most principled comrades”.

The day before his self-immolation, he sent a will to his friend, gave his cat to a neighbor and mentioned to his friend that his fridge was full for them to enjoy.

We Need You

It is important to know who Aaron was, as the tendency is to describe young men like him as insane, fanatics or zealots. 

The truth is Aaron was a healthy person who felt so helpless as to be part of an institution that is complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.

He was a sensitive person who sacrificed his life, hoping this would send a message.

We shall beseech people not to take these extreme measures. We need them on the streets, at the protests.

We need them to quit positions and jobs to demonstrate their humanity in the face of a genocide that is televised to us on an hourly basis, one that is still ongoing.

Aaron was ready to face future challenges in life.

He was actively pursuing a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the Western Governors University. Also, he had earlier engaged in coursework related to software development at the Southern New Hampshire University and computer science at the University of Maryland Global Campus, according to the information on his LinkedIn profile.

The mainstream media in the US asked how come a young man who loved the Lord of the Rings and karaoke would do something so extreme. They defined it as a mystery.  

The answer for them was not Palestine, but Aaron’s association with the religious group, a cult he belonged to as a child and that allegedly mistreated its members.

The explanation US media provided was that when you leave a tight-knit group, you find it hard to belong elsewhere. Maybe this is true, but still, it does not explain Aaron’s act of self-sacrifice.

He did not do this because he was a lost soul. 

To the contrary, the fact that he had experienced injustice, pushed him – in the words of his close friends –  to try and “defend those who don’t care or can’t defend themselves”. 

This is why he looked for ways of being a social activist for just causes.

Aaron is Not Alone

Mainstream media in the US refuses to accept Aaron’s, and many other young Americans’ perception of the injustice in Palestine as equal to that experienced by slaves in America, or the victims of American imperialism in Vietnam. 

But more and more young Americans realize that the US policy is one of the major reasons for the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians. Many more will be aware of it now.

Aaron was not a superficial observer.

He felt uneasy being in the army and began, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, to research the history of violence inflicted by the US, both domestically – against its own citizens – and across the world, against others. 

His soul-searching led him to consider leaving the army. His dream of a career was strongly associated with a wish to earn enough money to help the just causes he believed in.

It is not only Aaron that we should not forget.

We still do not know the name and identity of the brave woman who set herself on fire in front of the Israeli consulate in Atlanta last December. Even in that case, a Palestinian flag was found at the scene.

Aaron reminds us of Norman Morrison who did the same in front of the offices of Robert McNamara, the most senior American politician responsible for the devastation of Vietnam in the mid-1960s. 

And there were others in the US, such as Wyne Alan Bruce, who set himself on fire in April 2022 in Washington, on Earth Day, as a form of protest against international inaction in the face of environmental catastrophes, including climate change. 

And beyond the US, we all remember Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in 1963, in protest against the pro-American South Vietnamese persecution of Buddhist monks.

And we also remember Mohamed Bouaziz, the Tunisian food trader who, in his act of sacrifice, triggered what became known as the Arab Spring.

Inquiring a bit deeper, I was surprised to learn that hardly anyone in the US military voiced concern, let alone criticism, about the American involvement in the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Therefore, one can understand how lonely Aaron must have felt.

I wish we could all have talked to Aaron and told him that we could have used his expertise for the cause we all believe in. 

But the least we could do now is to remember him. 

And hopefully, one day, in a liberated Palestine, there will be a street to commemorate these brave young men and women, who taught the world that what is taking place in Palestine is an injustice that cannot be tolerated.

– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. He is the co-editor, with Ramzy Baroud of ‘Our Vision for Liberation.’ Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Joe Biden Is Shipping Weapons to Israel Every 36 Hours

By Stephen Semler, Jacobin, March 13, 2024

The Biden administration has been able to maintain a low profile by spreading arms provision to Israel across more than 100 smaller munitions sales — allowing the president to posture as a peacekeeper while US weapons wipe Gaza off the map.

President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting in the East Room of the White House on March 12, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)

In the one hundred fifty days after October 7, Israel killed thirty-one thousand Palestinians, injured seventy-two thousand, displaced 1.7 million, and razed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s buildings. Joe Biden sent over one hundred weapons shipments to Israel during the same stretch. In a recent classified briefing, US officials told members of Congress that the Biden administration approved and delivered more than one hundred separate weapons sales to Israel in the one hundred fifty days after October 7, “amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday. That works out to one new arms deal every thirty-six hours, on average.

These transfers are classified as sales, but very few of them meet that definition in the conventional sense. The vast majority are funded through State Department grants. Biden made just two of these publicly funded sales to Israel public, and the only reason he did is because he had to. Section 36 of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires the president to notify Congress when a proposed arms sale exceeds a certain value. The notification threshold depends on the type of matériel (for “significant military equipment” it’s $14 million; for other military articles and services, $50 million; for military construction services, $200 million), but also the recipient. For NATO countries and South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Israel, the notification thresholds for these three categories are considerably higher ($25 million, $100 million, and $300 million, respectively).

While Biden is loud and proud about arming Ukraine, he prefers to arm Israel in secret. The quantity of sales since October 7 is case in point. By spreading his military support for Israel across more than one hundred sales, Biden kept pretty much all of them “under threshold” per the AECA, thereby avoiding congressional and public scrutiny. Biden might have picked up this trick from his predecessor. Donald Trump exploited the same loophole to dodge oversight on arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose intense and indiscriminate bombing of Yemen at the time had created a dire humanitarian crisis.

Keeping these transfers out of public view makes it easier for Biden to cast himself as Humanitarian of the Year in Gaza while going great lengths to help Israel destroy it. Biden’s series of food airdrops suggests he’s bravely trying to fix a catastrophe beyond his control. Administration officials perpetuate this narrative by insisting the president has no leverage over Israel. “There is a mistaken belief that the United States is able to dictate to other countries’ sovereign decisions,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller recently said.

This is wrong. The catastrophe in Gaza is the result of a deliberate policy choice Biden made. Israel’s military offensive would not be possible without him fast-tracking such vast quantities of weapons to its arsenal over the last several months. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has admitted that Israel’s assault on Gaza relies on a steady stream (a torrent, in fact) of US weapons, once telling a group of local government officials, “We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions.” From October 7 to mid-February, Biden had delivered twenty-one thousand bombs to Israel, and Israel had already dropped half of them.

Netanyahu structured an urgent plea to US lawmakers in November in a similar way: “I need ammo, ammo, and ammo — yesterday,” he said and specifically requested 155 mm artillery shells. More than thirty aid and advocacy groups had urged the Biden administration not to supply this ammunition because the shells are unguided, highly explosive (with a casualty radius of 100 to 300 meters) and have been used by Israel in the past to hit hospitals, schools, shelters, and safe zones. Biden transferred 57,021 of them to Israel a few weeks later. The Israeli army announced in early December that it had fired more than one hundred thousand shells since its ground invasion of Gaza began on October 27, adding that artillery plays a “central role” by providing “intense fire cover” for its troops.

Israel lacks the production capacity to prosecute one of the deadliest, most intense bombing campaigns in history relying only on its own munitions. Israel’s assault on Gaza continues because Biden thinks it should continue. If he thought otherwise, he would shut down the weapons pipeline he constructed to enable it.

In a recent poll, 52 percent of Americans said the United States should halt weapons transfers to Israel, while only 27 percent said they should continue. Among 2020 Biden voters, the margin was 62 to 14 percent.

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Stephen Semler is cofounder of Security Policy Reform Institute, a grassroots-funded US foreign policy think tank.

Biden Aid Port Plan Rebuked as ‘Pathetic’ PR Effort as Israel Starves Gazans

Displaced Palestinian children gather to receive food at a donation point in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 7, 2024.

(Photo: Yasser Qudihe/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

“We need accountability, not more harebrained headline-chasing schemes,” said a campaigner with Medical Aid for Palestinians.

By Jake Johnson, Common dreams, Mar 07, 2024

President Joe Biden is expected to announce during his State of the Union address Thursday night that the U.S. military will construct a temporary port on Gaza’s coastline to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance, a plan that critics said is a far cry from what’s needed to end Israel’s forced starvation of the enclave’s population.

It’s expected to take up to two months for large aid packages to begin flowing through the seaport, which a White House official said would be able to “receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to demand Israel let in aid right now while Palestinian children are literally being starved to death?” asked Josh Ruebner, an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University and former policy director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “Waiting 45-60 days to build a temporary pier doesn’t help Palestinians starving to death today.”

“Besides, how are you going to offload the aid from the pier to the land given that Israel shoots at Palestinian boats all the time?” Ruebner continued. “And even if you get the aid to land, how does it get distributed to those most in need? Maybe you should have thought about that before you cut off aid to UNRWA, the only agency able to distribute aid throughout the Gaza Strip.”

The White House said Thursday that in addition to the aid port, it will “continue to work to increase the amount of aid flowing through existing border crossings at Rafah and Kerem Shalom.” The administration also said the Israeli government, at the request of the U.S., has “prepared a new land crossing directly into northern Gaza,” which Israel has mostly cut off from aid for months—causing children to starve to death.

“All of these efforts in order to avoid what actually matters: Stopping the war,” responded Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Pathetic.”

Biden’s port announcement will come days after the U.S. began airdropping aid into Gaza as Israel continued obstructing ground deliveries and attacking aid convoys. According to the United Nations, 150 aid trucks at most are reaching Gaza daily—half of the bare minimum needed.

“Israel has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, said Thursday.

“The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza can’t get through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a port.”

Aid that arrives at the temporary U.S. port will be routed through Cyprus and “will undergo prior inspection by Israel,” The Washington Postreported, raising concerns that Israel will impede the maritime shipments just as it has done with ground shipments.

U.S. officials claimed the port operation would not require any American troops on the ground but “did not provide details about how the pier would be built,” The Associated Pressreported. “One noted that the U.S. military has ‘unique capabilities’ and can do things from ‘just offshore.'”

Human rights groups and aid workers have implored the U.S. to exert pressure on the Israeli government—including by cutting off arms sales—to end its suffocating blockade, allow aid to flow freely through land crossings, and support a lasting cease-fire.

“Biden is sending Israel a new shipment of weapons every 36 hours,” said Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of the progressive Jewish advocacy group IfNotNow. “The aid that his administration is trying to get into Gaza can’t get through Israel’s blockade. Instead of announcing a total arms embargo—or at least until Israel allows aid to get in!—he is building a port.”

Rohan Talbot, director of advocacy and campaigns at Medical Aid for Palestinians, wrote on social media that “the infrastructure required to get aid to those who need it in Gaza already exists, the problem is just that Israel keeps attacking and obstructing it.”

“We need accountability, not more harebrained headline-chasing schemes,” Talbot added. “Literally nobody on the ground is advocating for this. They want you to stop providing the bombs doing the damage.”

President 𝐁𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬 ‘𝐄𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐲’ 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝐌𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐄𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡 𝐏𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐢𝐝

Biden is taking drastic measures to get aid into the Strip instead of using military aid to pressure Israel

by Dave DeCamp , Antiwar. com, March 7, 2024

President Biden announced during the State of the Union on Thursday night that he ordered a military mission to establish a port in Gaza to get more aid into the Strip as Palestinians are starving to death and Israel is still restricting aid.

The drastic measure is being ordered instead of Biden using the enormous leverage he has over Israel to pressure them to allow in more aid or halt the genocidal campaign. The US also recently started conducting airdrops of aid into Gaza, which aid groups have slammed as a public relations ploy.

“Tonight, I’m directing the US military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters,” Biden said.

US officials claimed to Axios that the pier in the sea off the Gaza coast will allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter the Strip per day. But the pier will take weeks to build, and Palestinians are already starving to death at a rapid rate.

Biden insisted there would be “no US boots on the ground.” But the plan does still run the risk of US personnel being targeted off the coast, which could lead to a major escalation of US involvement in the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians.

The aid will pass through Cyprus before heading to the pier and will be subject to Israeli inspections, which means some could be turned away.

CNN reported that some of the items most frequently rejected by Israel include anesthetics and anesthesia machines, oxygen cylinders, ventilators, and water filtration systems. The CNN report said other items that have faced restrictions are dates, sleeping bags, medicines to treat cancer, water purification tablets, and maternity kits.

Biden acknowledged in his speech that Israel has killed “thousands and thousands of innocent women and children” but gave no indication he was reconsidering his policy of unconditional military support for the slaughter.

“More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly 2 million more Palestinians under bombardment or displaced. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine,” he said.

The Washington Post revealed on Wednesday that Biden’s administration has approved over 100 arms deals for Israel since October 7.

–

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com

No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived

By Ben Burgis, Jacobin, March 7, 2024

Arguments over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point. No one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from.

People who insist that either Palestinians or Israelis are “indigenous” to the land are embracing the logic of reactionaries. (Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Claudia Tenney is a congresswoman from upstate New York. Much of her district (NY-24) was, for centuries before “New York state” came into existence, the territory of the Iroquois Confederacy. A right-wing Republican, Tenney presumably doesn’t think much of land acknowledgments or hand-wringing about the idea that NY-24 sits on “stolen land.”

And yet, Tenney is in the news this week for introducing something called the RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act. She wants to require that US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria.” She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.”

The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land acknowledgment.

Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank. At a recent appearance at the Cambridge Union in the UK, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro argued that Israel is “the ultimate case of decolonization in human history after return of a native population to its homeland and battle to throw off the shackles of the British Empire.”

There’s surely an element of trolling in Shapiro’s use of this language. Since when does he care about “decolonization” anywhere else? But he’s deadly serious about his support for the status quo in Israel/Palestine. He recently claimed, for example, that a Palestinian state would be an unacceptable “terrorist entity on Israel’s borders.” And I seriously doubt that Shapiro wants the five million or so Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to be granted Israeli citizenship, which would make Israel no longer a specifically “Jewish state” but a multiethnic democracy with roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

So presumably he wants those millions of people to continue to be denied basic rights — to continue to be tried in military courts instead of real courts when they’re accused of crimes, for example, and to continue to be unable to vote their rulers out of office. And the justification for that would have to be the one cited by Congresswoman Tenney: Israel’s “historical claim” to the land.

There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced at least 85 percent of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are “settlers” and “colonizers.” I’ve seen social media posts, for example, where pictures of stereotypically “white”-looking Israeli Jews with European-sounding surnames are used to mock the idea that Israelis are “indigenous to the Middle East.”

The implication happens to be wrong. On at least some estimates, Ashkenazi Jews, whose ancestors once lived in Northern or Eastern Europe, make up less than a third of Israel’s Jewish population. They’re greatly outnumbered by Israeli Jews whose ancestors lived in various Middle Eastern countries during the same time period and who often had to flee from those countries in the twentieth century. But this kind of rhetoric isn’t just wrong because it’s based on a shaky understanding of the facts. It’s deeply wrong in principle.

The great German socialist thinker August Bebel famously said that antisemitism is “the socialism of fools,” since antisemites tend to scapegoat cabals of “Jewish bankers” for the problems of an entire economic system. To tweak Bebel’s observation a bit, this kind of rhetoric about all Israelis being “settlers” whose presence in their country is illegitimate represents the anti-Zionism of fools. Zionism should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No nation-state should be a state “of” a specific ethnic or religious subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone.

People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries like Tenney and Shapiro while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question.

The Iroquois Confederacy probably came together somewhere between five hundred and nine hundred years ago, depending on which estimates you believe. The tribes that made it up were already there before that, and presumably before they were there, other groups lived in the same area. Humans have lived there for about ten thousand years. It was wrong to displace the Iroquois, and if their ancestors displaced some earlier group, that was wrong too. Whatever injustices fill the history books, though, everyone except for outright racists and fascists takes it for granted that everyone who lives there now should have equal rights now, regardless of any ethnic group’s “historical claims.” The exact same principle should apply to Israel/Palestine.

Even someone as rabidly right-wing as Tenney would presumably grant that everyone in her district should have democratic rights, regardless of whether their ancestors lived in the Iroquois Confederacy or their great-great-grandparents came to New York from Ireland in the 1800s or they’re first-generation immigrants who take their citizenship test last week. And anyone who can acknowledge that should also recognize that no one in Israel/Palestine should be denied rights based on their ancestors having lived in the wrong place — whether “wrong” ancestry means not being descended from ancient Judeans and Samarians or not having great-great-grandparents who lived in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel.

The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by the French Revolutionaries in 1789.

Those principles say that everyone is entitled to the same package of rights, just for being a human being. Socialists think that package includes the right to have your material needs met and the right to have a say in the economic decisions that touch your life. But even liberals believe in a set of universal rights that are clearly inconsistent with displacing anyone from their homes or denying anyone a democratic say in the political institutions that govern them because they come from the “wrong” ethnic background.

Many actually existing liberals are woefully inconsistent in their application of these principles, especially when it comes to Israel/Palestine. But the principles themselves are correct, and sticking to them is the only way out of interminable and deadly land feuds.

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Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.