On June 25, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels), which organises the world’s biggest annual book fair (in Frankfurt), announced it was awarding its annual “Peace Prize” to US journalist and author Anne Applebaum.
Tag: front organizations
The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Concentration Camps
The Postwar Vision That Sees Gaza Sliced Into Security Zones
A plan that is gaining currency in the government and military envisions creating geographical “islands” or “bubbles” where Palestinians who are unconnected to Hamas can live in temporary shelter while the Israeli military mops up remaining insurgents.
Other members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party are backing another, security-focused plan that seeks to slice up Gaza with two corridors running across its width and a fortified perimeter that would allow Israel’s military to mount raids when it deems them necessary.
The ideas come from informal groups of retired army and intelligence officers, think tanks, academics and politicians, as well as internal discussions inside the military. While Israel’s political leadership has said almost nothing about how the Gaza Strip will look and be governed after the heaviest fighting ends, these groups have been working on detailed plans that offer a glimpse of how Israel is thinking about what it calls the Day After.
The plans—whether or not they get adopted in full—reveal hard realities about the aftermath that rarely get voiced. Among them, that Palestinian civilians could be confined indefinitely to smaller areas of the Gaza Strip while fighting continues outside, and that Israel’s army could be forced to remain deeply involved in the enclave for years until Hamas is marginalized.
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According to people familiar with the effort, it aims to work with local Palestinians who are unaffiliated with Hamas to set up isolated zones in northern Gaza. Palestinians in areas where Israel believes Hamas no longer holds sway would distribute aid and take on civic duties. Eventually, a coalition of U.S. and Arab states would manage the process, these people said.
Ziv, who oversaw Israel’s exit from Gaza in 2005, proposes that Palestinians who are ready to denounce Hamas could register to live in fenced-off geographic islands located next to their neighborhoods and guarded by the Israeli military. This would entitle them to reconstruction of their homes.
The process would be gradual, and in the longer term, Ziv envisages bringing the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority back to Gaza as a political solution, with the whole process taking roughly five years as the military fights Hamas insurgents. Under his plan, Hamas could be part of Gaza’s administration, if it frees all the hostages held there and disarms, becoming purely a political movement.
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Northern Gaza, under the plan, would remain without reconstruction, and Palestinians there wouldn’t be allowed back to their homes until Hamas’s miles-long tunnel network was destroyed. Like the bubbles plan, it promotes the notion of de-escalation zones where aid can be delivered by the Israeli military or by international forces, but stops short of articulating an idea for governance.
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Another plan published by the Washington-based Wilson Center* also advocates a coalition-style approach to the conflict but refrains from calling for Israel to consider the adoption of a Palestinian state. It says the U.S. should establish an international police force to manage security in Gaza and over time hand the job to a yet-to-be-defined Palestinian administration.
Robert Silverman**, a former U.S. diplomat in Iraq who is a co-author, said his team discussed the plan with Israeli officials for months, even changing parts of the proposal to make it more agreeable to Israel’s war objectives and political dynamics, but it stalled with the prime minister’s office.
“He believes we finish the war first and then plan the postwar,” Silverman said of Netanyahu. “All the people who have done this before say that’s a huge mistake.”
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Another document, drafted by Israeli academics, that has made its way to the prime minister’s desk draws on historical precedents in rebuilding the war zones in Germany and Japan after World War II, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. It considers how to tackle Hamas’s Islamist doctrine by learning from the defeat of ideologies such as Nazism and that of Islamic State.
Related:
The Strategic Hamlet Program (SHP; Vietnamese: Ấp Chiến lược) was a plan by the government of South Vietnam in conjunction with the US government and ARPA during the Vietnam War to combat the communist insurgency by pacifying the countryside and reducing the influence of the communists among the rural population through the creation of concentration camps.
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The Strategic Hamlet Program was unsuccessful, failing to stop the insurgency or gain support for the government from rural Vietnamese, it alienated many and helped contribute to the growth in influence of the Viet Cong. After President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown in a coup in November 1963, the program was cancelled. Peasants moved back into their old homes or sought refuge from the war in the cities. The failure of the Strategic Hamlet and other counterinsurgency and pacification programs were causes that led the United States to decide to intervene in South Vietnam with air strikes and ground troops.
The *Wilson Center plan isn’t much better. 👇🏻
Related:
Read More »Philippines: Expose and denounce the American warmonger Col. Raymond Powell
😹
Fight Back News Service is circulating the following statement from the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Former US air force colonel, Raymond M. Powell, is an active psywar operative, interventionist, war-monger and American agent-provocateur. From an obscure career in the US military, he has been receiving much air time from big Philippine media organizations since last year, touted as a “security analyst” and “expert on maritime issues.”
Philippines: Expose and denounce the American warmonger Col. Raymond Powell
Previously:
Welcome to Kenya’s Gen Z Revolution!
Welcome to Kenya’s Gen Z Revolution!
Kenya had been praised to the heavens by the West in yesteryear: it was a beacon of hope and prosperity; East Africa’s most prosperous nation; a success story of capitalism and “development”; and (most important of all) a bulwark of the West amidst encroaching Chinese influence on the continent.
Kenya is a member of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and Ruto just sent the Kenyan Police to Haiti. 🤷🏼♀️
Related/Notes:
Gen Z Will Lead the People’s Revolution in Kenya (The Elephant*)
Read More »CIA Front, East-West Center honors PH STAR editor-in-chief
East-West Center honors STAR editor-in-chief
MANILA, Philippines — The East-West Center in Hawaii has chosen The Philippine Star editor-in-chief Ana Marie Pamintuan as one of this year’s Journalists of Courage and Impact.
In conferring the award, the East-West Center said Pamintuan and the six other honorees from across Asia, the Pacific and the United States “have displayed exceptional commitment to quality reporting and freedom of the press often under harrowing circumstances.”
Also receiving the award on Monday night were Sincha Dimara, news editor, Inside PNG in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea; Tom Grundy, founder and editor-in-chief, the Hong Kong Free Press (Hong Kong); Alan C. Miller, founder of the Washington-based News Literacy Project; Soe Myint, editor-in-chief and managing director of Mizzima (Chiang Mai, Thailand); John Nery, columnist and editorial consultant of Rappler and Kamal Siddiqi, former news director of Aaj News (Karachi, Pakistan).
Related:
The East–West Center (EWC), or the Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West, is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960, officially to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. It is headquartered in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The center had long been affiliated with CIA activities in the Asia-Pacific region. Barack Obama’s mother Ann Dunham worked on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.
Observations on the pundits in the PH media
Retired Supreme Court associate justice Antonio Carpio says the Philippine government should accept Vietnam and Malaysia’s invitation to take China to an arbitral court on their territorial disputes.
US-funded Rappler:
[OPINION] Ayungin and why PH should respond as one team, one nation (archived):
This crisis should be turned into an opportunity.
We have postponed the replacement of the BRP Sierra Madre for years, for fear of escalating tension at Ayungin Shoal. Now is the time to either construct a concrete facility or deploy a self-propelled oil platform inside the shoal as a permanent station for our troops; which should be far superior in terms of habitability, self-defense, and supportability. If completed, some of the Navy’s missile boats can be redeployed to secure the shoal, instead of languishing in Mindanao and conducting anti-smuggling operations.” – Retired Rear Admiral Rommel Jude Ong.
One thing that I’ve noticed about these pundits being quoted in the PH media, is that all of them have ties to the Stratbase Group, which includes the Stratbase ADR Institute and BowerGroupAsia. Both the Stratbase ADR Institute and BowerGroupAsia have connections to Ray Powell and the U.S. government.
Read More »Protected: What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander?
Behind the Myth of “Billions in Arms” Flowing into Ukraine
World Spending On Nukes Explodes To More Than $90 Billion
World Spending On Nukes Explodes To More Than $90 Billion
Honeywell International, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics topped the list of companies profiting from nuclear weapons expenditures.
That flood of public funds to private contractors was coupled by significant spending by these companies on efforts to shape the debate around government spending. The companies spent $118 million lobbying governments in the U.S. and France in 2023 and donated more than $6 million to think tanks researching and writing about nuclear weapons.
Lockheed Martin contributed to the most think tanks, including: Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, Chatham House, Center for a New American Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Hudson Institute, and Observer Research Foundation.
Reuters Exposes Washington’s Global Disinformation Campaign: The Rest of the Story
In a recent article, Reuters confirms what many knew for years, that the United States government and its various departments and agencies have been conducting global disinformation campaigns targeting nations it seeks to undermine, and whose governments it seeks to overthrow.
Reuters Exposes Washington’s Global Disinformation Campaign: The Rest of the Story
Previously:
Philippines: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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