FRIENDS OF PALESTINE AGAINST IMPERIALISM AND ZIONISM

We are joining in wishing you Happy Birthday and all that you wish for yourself,” Ehud Barak emailed Jeffrey Epstein on January 20, 2014, the billionaire pedophile’s sixty-first birthday, as he explained how a surprise gift he and his wife, Nili Priel, had tried to arrange had fallen through. “I’m proud to be able calling [sic] you my friend.”

“Thank you. Look forward to seeing you, lots to talk about,” Epstein replied.

Barak and Epstein did have much to talk about — so much, in fact, that the pair met in person dozens of times over the course of the previous decade to talk in person, a perusal of the Justice Department’s latest release of files on the late sex offender show.

Jacobin looked at more than one thousand documents from the latest trove and identified more than sixty instances between September 2010 and March 2019 in which Barak and Epstein arranged to meet face to face — usually in New York, other times in Florida, Boston, Paris, or even Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St James. At least seven of those meetings took place while Barak was still serving as minister of defense for Israel.

That count does not include the dozens more times where the two arranged or tried to arrange to talk over the phone or via video call, nor their frequent email exchanges to each other. It also does not necessarily include the more than two dozen times in that period that Barak stayed at one of Epstein’s properties, typically the Upper East Side apartment building on 301 East 66th Street that he owned, which his staff referred to internally as simply “301.”

Since the thousand or so files are just a fraction of the total number of Barak-related documents in the trove, it is entirely possible these are undercounts. Yet the more than sixty meetings between the two is roughly double the number of times that Barak and Epstein had earlier been thought to have met, according to a previous Wall Street Journal report. And that report only went as far back as 2013, leaving out several years of meetings that Barak had with Epstein while he was still serving in Israel’s government.

The disclosures add to the recent stream of explosive revelations about Epstein’s relationship to Barak and, in turn, to the Israeli state. Epstein, long rumored to have ties to Israeli intelligence, has in a series of stories by Drop Site News been revealed to have worked with Barak to broker security agreements and arms sales on Israel’s behalf. Last year, Jacobin revealed that Epstein had privately claimed to have been behind Barak’s 2019 political comeback in Israel — revelations that, after being tweeted by current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, caused a firestorm in the country.

Now it turns out that Epstein’s relationship with Barak and the government he served in are even more extensive. Jacobin has reached out to Barak for comment and will update the article should we receive a response.

“Ehud Would Like to Talk to Jeffrey”

Barak is no longer as proud to be associated with Epstein, who he said last month he “deeply regret[s] having any association with.” Yet for many years, the documents show, the pair enjoyed a warm, even intimate friendship, in spite of the fact that, by this point, Epstein was a registered sex offender who had pled guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor after investigators discovered numerous underage victims who said he sexually abused them. As late as November 2018, less than a year before the billionaire sex offender was arrested and died in prison, Barak referred to Epstein as a “great friend.”

“R U Ok? Long time no hear. We’re missing you,” read one August 2, 2014 email from “Ehud & Nili,” Barak’s wife of, at that point, seven years, through whom many of his meetings with Epstein were scheduled.

Epstein and Barak regularly reached out to meet or talk, inquired about each other’s travel plans, or informed each other where they were, in case it meant they could meet. Epstein got regular email alerts and reminders that Barak was in town. Barak contributed a personalized “birthday letter” for Epstein before his sixty-third birthday, and Epstein, in turn, sent gifts and packages to Barak. The billionaire even appeared to have the former Israeli prime minister’s MRI result on file.

Typically, the two met one-on-one, for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The frequency of their meetings appears to have grown over time. In one ten-month stretch from January to October 2016, the pair had at least one meeting every single month. In seven of the months in that period, emails show that Barak stayed at Epstein’s Upper East Side apartment building at some point in the month.

Sometimes they met multiple times a month. In September 2013, the two had at least seven meetings over the course of a few days with a variety of figures, including banker Ariane de Rothschild, then French presidential adviser Olivier Colom, billionaire couple Bill and Melinda Gates, former Clinton official and then chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education Joel Klein, and Terje Rød-Larsen, the architect of the Oslo Accords.

The fact that the pair were meeting and communicating while Barak was Israel’s defense minister, a post he officially left in March 18, 2013, is particularly concerning, raising the possibility that Epstein was able to exert influence over Israeli government policy. At least one text exchange between the two, from January 2013, suggests Barak was seeking out and incorporating Epstein’s ideas while serving in the post, with the two arranging to talk over the phone as Barak prepared to apparently coordinate something related to that year’s coming World Economic Forum in Davos.

“At the end of today lets [sic] review responses,” Epstein texted.

“hi Jeff I’m exhausted . spent several hours on my present(still) job over the secure phone. re Davos it goes quite well. but still embryonic and hard to predict . details tomorrow,” Barak texted him the following day.

“thx for your advice on the approach. it was very important and timely,” Barak added.

Barak continued to lean on Epstein for advice once he became a private citizen. Barak sought Epstein’s opinion on opinion pieces he wrote, on the business ventures he pursued, and on the draft and even title of his 2018 book.

Multiple times, he requested to speak to Epstein urgently, as when, upon visiting Washington, DC, in early May 2018, Nili emailed Epstein’s account that her husband “would like to have an urgent short meeting with Jeffrey” (emphasis in original) the very day they arrived back in New York from the capital. “Of course,” replied Epstein. Emails show the two ended up meeting on the date and window of time that Nili proposed. It’s not clear exactly what they discussed, although the day after Nili’s email, Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement, a decision Barak publicly commented on in the days that followed.

When Barak got an invite in September 2014 from a couple named Bill White and Bryan Eure to a private fundraiser with then president Barack Obama, he immediately turned to Epstein.

“Ehud would like to know if you have any information or knowledge about them and is it worthwhile to meet them next time he is in NY?” Nili wrote to Epstein. Epstein replied that he did not know them, but included what seems to have been an extract copied-and-pasted from White’s Wikipedia page about his involvement in a state pension fund pay-to-play scandal years earlier. “Thanks,” replied Nili.

Who’s Who

On many occasions, Epstein and Barak met with others. At least two of Barak’s meetings with Epstein also featured Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who, emails show, Epstein and his team took pains to introduce to Barak — despite Bannon’s openly playing footsie with the far right, and the fact that he was accused by his ex-wife of holding antisemitic views.

In September 2010, three years into Barak’s tenure as Israeli defense minister, the duo were joined for a private dinner by another Epstein associate: the now-disgraced Larry Summers, then still serving as the National Economic Council director for Barack Obama. “Jeffrey wants to make sure you know the dinner party on Tues. Sept. 21 is ‘100% off-line,’” Epstein’s longtime executive assistant Lesley Groff wrote to Summers before the dinner.

Emails show that Epstein had tried to entice others to attend the dinner, which was described to invitees as “very private, no agenda,” including pro-Israel billionaire Len Blavatnik and Walter Isaacson, president and CEO of the foreign-policy-focused Aspen institute. While they couldn’t make it, one man who did appears to have been Jes Staley, a Wall Street titan and longtime Epstein friend whose career was ended by his association with the pedophile.

Epstein, Barak, and Staley got together again years later at a February 2015 meeting, where they were joined by private equity billionaire Leon Black. Other notable names who met with the duo over the years include billionaire and future Trump fundraiser and official Tom Barrack, Obama’s ex–White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, newspaper tycoon Mort Zuckerman, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff, famed former talk show host Dick Cavett, and Tom Pritzker, billionaire hotel magnate and executive chairman of the hawkish Center for Strategic and International Studies.

There are occasional hints that not all of these events were your run-of-the-mill gatherings of the rich and powerful. In one August 2013 email exchange, Barak and another Epstein associate, Bill Gates adviser Boris Nikolic, discussed where they could meet in person, with Barak mentioning he would be in New York that September for the “Clinton GI [Global Initiative].”

“I will be in NYC that whole week and I look forward to seeing you and catching up — most likely at Jeffrey’s — it is more interesting there than at CGI ;),” Nikolic replied.

No Man Is an Island

But whether Barak was meeting with Epstein or not, he and his wife, Nili, appeared to have an open invitation to stay at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment building, which they frequently did. Sometimes they stayed for only a few days. Sometimes they stayed for five. Sometimes they stayed for eight or even as many as twelve days. On at least four occasions, they had multiple stints at “301” in a single month.

Epstein appeared to grant the couple free rein in the property. “[Nili] can use my house to make a small dinner with any people that ehud would like to talk to privately,” Epstein instructed one of his assistants to pass on to Barak’s wife in an undated email.

Barak and Nili stayed so often at Epstein’s Upper East Side property that even the billionaire’s assistants remarked on the extent to which they had made themselves at home there.

“Jeffrey is asking if you can get faster internet for apt 11J…Ehud is requesting it…,” Groff emailed in October 2015. “looks like this is slowly becoming his apartment!….” The request was fulfilled twenty minutes later.

When Barak was set to visit at the same time as several other influential friends of Epstein in September the following year — namely physicist Lawrence Krauss and Rød-Larsen — Groff informed a staff member that “Ehud will be in his regular apt.” While she arranged welcome letters to be placed in the apartments that Krauss and Rød-Larsen would be staying in, she made clear that “Ehud does not need a welcome letter…”

Emails show that by 2017 and 2018 Barak’s wife was directly emailing staff and personally requesting that the apartments be cleaned in accordance with when they were coming and going.

At one point, in December 2014, Barak and his wife appear to have visited Epstein’s infamous private island. That month, Epstein emailed his assistants that “ehud should stay at the ritz in st thomas,” referring to the luxury hotel on the Caribbean island just northwest of Epstein’s own private island.

The email prompted confusion from staff, who were unaware Barak would be visiting St Thomas and didn’t know whether they would be making the hotel reservation on Epstein’s card. The next day, Epstein confirmed he would be picking up the tab for the couple’s stay, and at his request, staff made arrangements for their travel between the Ritz-Carlton and the St Thomas airport.

“ehud coing [sic] to island this weekend,” Epstein emailed Melanie Spinella, adviser to his friend and fellow billionaire Leon Black, the following day.

An Inconvenient Trove

The voluminous documentation of Barak’s contacts and close friendship with Epstein is inconvenient to several people. First and foremost, it’s inconvenient to Barak, who insisted for years that he only saw Epstein “on occasion” and more recently denied Epstein’s claim, which we at Jacobin unearthed in last year’s government disclosures, that he had been behind Barak’s return to Israeli politics in the country’s 2019 election.

But it is also inconvenient to the emerging media narrative that Epstein was a Kremlin spy or otherwise an intelligence asset for the Russian government and nothing else. Simply put, there is no Russian equivalent in Epstein’s life to Ehud Barak, a former prime minister and defense minister of Israel who these disclosures show was meeting with and taking advice from the pedophile while he was serving in the Israeli government, and whose friendship with him dramatically deepened in the years that followed.

Epstein is now widely acknowledged, even by one of his own friends and a current Trump official, as having used blackmail against powerful people — or, in the words of the New York Times, “keeping notes on some of his contacts” and “revel[ing] in claiming to know his friends’ secrets” and how they “might empower him.” Yet the fact that this might have involved one of Israel’s most prominent political figures continues to be strangely unspeakable in mainstream political discourse.

(This text, written by Branko Marcetic,  was originally published on jacobin.com)

Israeli fire strikes journalists and children on one of Gaza’s deadliest days since ceasefire.

Israeli forces on Wednesday killed at least 11 Palestinians in Gaza, including two 13-year-old boys, three journalists and a woman, hospitals said, on one of the war-battered enclave ‘s deadliest days since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel took effect in October.

The United States is trying to push the deal forward and implement its challenging second phase.

Among the dead were three Palestinian journalists who were killed while filming near a displacement camp in central Gaza, a camp official said. Israel’s military said it had spotted suspects who were operating a drone that posed a threat to its troops.

The two boys were killed in separate incidents. In one, a 13-year-old, his father and a 22-year old man were hit by Israeli drones on the eastern side of the Bureij refugee camp, according to officials from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central town of Deir al-Balah, which received the bodies.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the three had crossed into Israeli-controlled areas.

A mounting death toll

The other 13-year-old was shot by troops in the eastern town of Bani Suheila, Nasser Hospital said after receiving the body. In a video circulated online, the father of Moatsem al-Sharafy is seen weeping over it.

The boy’s mother, Safaa al-Sharafy, told The Associated Press that he had left to gather firewood so she could cook.

“He went out in the morning, hungry,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “He told me he’d go quickly and come back.”

Over 100 children killed in Gaza during ceasefire

James Elder, spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), announced that over 100 children have been killed in Gaza during the nearly three-month ceasefire.

Later Wednesday, an Israeli strike hit a vehicle carrying the three Palestinian journalists who were filming a new displacement camp managed by an Egyptian government committee in the Netzarim area, said Mohammed Mansour, the committee’s spokesperson.

Mansour said the journalists were documenting the committee’s work and that the strike occurred about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from the Israeli-controlled area. He said the vehicle was known to Israel’s military as belonging to the committee. Video footage showed the charred and smoking vehicle by the roadside.

In the days since a fragile ceasefire took hold, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza finally began returning to their homes. Survivors began searching through the remains of dozens of bodies recovered from the rubble of destroyed homes, desperate to find any sign of their missing loved ones. 

Two things were happening at the same time:

1. In the West Bank, Palestinians were being attacked by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, including troops redeployed from Gaza. 
   
   
2. As Trump was being sworn in, his new BFF Elon Musk was giving what looked like a Nazi salute, and the ADL was coming to Musk’s defense.

Escalating violence in the West Bank.

Shortly after he was inaugurated, Trump issued a slew of destructive executive orders, including lifting sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on violent Israeli settlers.

With a green light to attack Palestinians with impunity, Israeli settlers raided Palestinian villages across the Occupied West Bank on Monday and Tuesday. Protected and enabled by the Israeli military, they terrorized local residents, setting vehicles and homes on fire and injuring at least 21 people.

At the same time, the Israeli military launched a large-scale operation in the Palestinian city of Jenin, killing at least 10 Palestinians and injuring dozens of others. Palestinians describe Israeli airstrikes, bulldozers being used to destroy roads, and Apache helicopters hovering overhead while snipers fired on anyone who tried to escape. 

In one disturbing video, a man is seen walking down an empty road when he comes under Israeli gunfire. He tries to run before collapsing to the ground, dead.   

Even before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the U.N. began counting the dead in 2005. After October 7, Israeli violence in the West Bank skyrocketed: More than half of the over 500 Palestinians murdered in the West Bank in 2023 were killed between October and December of that year. 

Trump, the right, and the ADL.

It will take billions to rebuild Gaza, assuming the fragile ceasefire agreement that came into effect on January 19 actually holds. Trump has already expressed skepticism that it will; his priorities lie elsewhere.

On Monday, Trump described Gaza — the site of a U.S.-backed genocide that has killed tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of people — as a “phenomenal location on the sea,” echoing comments made during his election campaign that the besieged enclave could be “better than Monaco.” 

Like his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump seems more concerned about the value of the real estate than what happens to the two million Palestinians who live in Gaza. That’s something he shares in common with Israel’s extremist, far-Right government, whose aim has always been maximum land, minimum Palestinians. 

Trump and the Israeli government share the same right-wing agenda, and despite what they may claim, it has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Israeli settlers immediately earned him praise from Israel’s right-wing finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who once said that there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people. 

Pro-Israel groups in the U.S. are also making it clear that their loyalties lie with Trump’s anti-Palestinian agenda, turning a blind eye to the increasingly blatant antisemitism coming from Right-wing politicians. When Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute at his inauguration on Monday, the Anti-Defamation League — a so-called civil rights group dedicated to fighting antisemitism — wrote it off as an awkward gesture. This is a shockingly casual posture, compared to their response to  those who join a protest calling for an end to genocide.  The ADL condemns those people (often Jews) as violent antisemites. 

The ADL claims to prioritize the fight against antisemitism, but all they really care about is maintaining U.S. support for Israel. Increasingly, that means backing a far-Right agenda that makes Jews and all marginalized people less safe.

With Trump and his allies in power, the movement we’ve built together faces new heights of repression. It is up to us to resist Trump’s right-wing agenda, to turn the temporary ceasefire in Gaza into a full halt of the genocide, and to cry out with everything we have to stop Israel from expanding its campaign of total destruction to the West Bank. Enormous challenges lay ahead, but we also have a critical opening: The vast majority of U.S. Jews didn’t vote for Trump, yet U.S. support for Israel is increasingly a Right-wing project, which puts the contradictions inherent in Jewish support for Israel into even sharper focus.

The choice being presented by Israel’s Right-wing backers — between Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety — is a false one. The Right wants us isolated, to convince us that only our own struggles matter, and that others’ pain doesn’t exist. In reality, the only way to build a better future for all of us is to recognize each other’s humanity. 

This text is published in JVP’s web page on 22nd of January, 2025. (https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/01/22/adl-defends-nazi-salutes/?utm_source=wire&utm_medium=email&sourceid=1001761&emci=f67471af-e1d8-ef11-88d0-0022482a9d92&emdi=df097d72-fbd8-ef11-88d0-0022482a9d92&ceid=69880

During the last month only, the Turkish government has sent 88 ships to Israel in addition to four ships that are currently en route to Israel, which can be easily checked from MarineTraffic website (https://www.marinetraffic.com), which tracks global ship trafficking. Given official statements by Erdoğan’s government, one should, therefore, ask how it is possible that these ships still go to Israel if the trade has already stopped.

The answer is simple. The Turkish and Israeli governments have never been enemies. The trade has been sacred and mutually beneficial for both Erdoğan and Netanyahu. It is handled through back channels.

After Israel’s genocidal campaign on Gaza began, Turkish officials, including the trade minister, and their aligned journalists rejected the trade with Israel or tried to justify it. This lie continued for six months, during which the government met all the essential needs of the Israeli army, which was busy committing genocide. After the election defeat on 31 March, the trade that was under the counter was finally confessed by the officials and announced to be stopped.

Was it really stopped? No. While both Turkish and Israeli governments made harsh statements against each other, they were also planning how this trade could continue. Let us look at a news article from an Israeli newspaper.  (https://www.ynet.co.il/economy/article/sjmm6y2qc)

Israel reciprocated Turkey’s decision to halt trade by doing the same. But trade had to continue somehow because Israel’s needs for steel, cement, raw materials, food, clothing, and many other things were met by Turkey. Cutting the trade completely would cause serious problems in Israel in the middle of its genocidal campaign. Therefore, with an insidious agreement between the two, the trade was decided to be handled not through Israel, but Palestine, in which tens of thousands of people has been killed. In official documents, Israel banned imports from Turkey but allowed it to continue secretly as if it were being done with Palestine. According to the Israeli newspaper report, the documents of the ship departing from Turkey are arranged as if they are arriving in Palestine. What happens is that the ship docks at an Israeli port and the goods are delivered to Israel. For this method, a commission of 3-5% is paid to a company established in Palestine that appears as the recipient of the goods when departing from Turkey.

This information can also be verified from another source. A few days ago, @inanmutlu1 noticed something extraordinarily absurd in foreign trade statistics based on Ministry of Trade data. There were astronomical increases in steel, cement, etc., products that were taken by Palestinians who were killed, starved, bombed, and struggling to survive. The Ministry of Trade had made an arrangement that even the materials sent to the Israeli army were shown in the official documents as if they were going to Palestine. There could never have been a nastier trick than this method that was done in agreement with Israel. (link: https://x.com/inanmutlu1/status/1841405170581651858?t=0l3K7yEdK9t7pblfhPyGJw&s=09)

There are other methods too. For example, shipments to Israel are carried out through companies established in countries like Greece, Romania, Italy. The source of the high increase appearing on paper in exports of some products to these three countries is also this sneaky method. Not to forget the fact that the Turkish government is also continuing oil and fuel shipments to Israel. Israel is a country without its own oil that completely depends on external sources. Azerbaijan is the key country that meets Israel’s needs. Our government is complicit in genocide for transporting the oil to Zionists. In return, they receive 80 cents ($0.8) per barrel of oil. No sanctions have been imposed so far on Zionists for oil transportation. Not even a symbolic sanction. The government has done nothing that would put Israel in trouble. They just talk pompous words and condemn them verbally while continuing to meet all Israel’s crucial needs. As for the Palestinian people, apart from endless good wishes, the government has done virtually nothing that would materially benefit them. Erdoğan’s government is also complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. It is our duty to expose their complicity and lies.  

The Hannibal Directive, named after Hannibal – an ancient Carthaginian general who poisoned himself rather than be captured alive – is a war procedure adopted by the Israeli army, first implemented during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1986 and kept as a secretive military doctrine until 2003. This doctrine allows the Israeli army to kill its own citizens to stop resistance fighters from capturing Israeli soldiers who could be used as prisoner exchanges. According to the Hannibal Directive, “the kidnapping must be stopped by all means, even at the price of striking and harming our own forces”. As reported by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper on July 7, the Israeli army employed the Hannibal Directive multiple times on October 7, targeting Israelis detained by the Qassam Brigades.

According to Haaretz reports, the IDF bombed at least three military bases and outposts, which were entirely overrun by Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian armed factions on October 7.  The IDF also heavily fired upon the fenced area dividing Gaza and Israel as Palestinian fighters returned to the strip with captured Israelis. The army also issued an order stating that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”, which killed the detained Israeli citizens and soldiers.

The testimony of an anonymous Israeli helicopter commander, published by Ynet news, the online outlet affiliated with Yedioth Ahronoth, also confirmed by the Electronic Intifada, revealed that the Apache helicopters indiscriminately fired at everything in the fenced area, targeting Palestinian fighters and Israelis alike. The commander of Squadron 190, Lieutenant Colonel A, instructed the Israeli pilots to “shoot at everything they see in the area of the fence”. At one point, the pilots also attacked an IDF station with trapped soldiers.

An investigation conducted by the United Nations revealed that Israeli tanks killed 13 Israeli detainees being held in a house in Kibbutz Beeri. According to the witnesses on the ground, the IDF launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the house. An Israeli general in charge of the Kibbutz told the soldiers: “Break in, even at the cost of civilian casualties”, who was later cleared of wrongdoing by an IDF investigation in April.

The obvious conclusion of the Hannibal Directive is that Israel killed many of its own people. The Palestinian military assault on October 7 was so successful that the Israel’s command and control units in the region was quickly eliminated, the communications infrastructure across the entire region was completely damaged until later in the day. The surprise attack by the Qassam Brigades put the IDF in desperate situations where the Israeli pilots had to use their own mobile phones to contact the local Israeli militias and senior officers in the area to obtain permissions for the commands. The Hannibal Directive was applied by the IDF to eliminate the possibility of a hostage deal at the cost of killing their own civilians.

The ongoing genocide in Palestine has completed its 9th month and bombs continue to rain on Palestinians. The death toll exceeded 37,000. There are more than 20,000 missing people, mostly under the debris. Gaza turned into a pile of rubble that will take years to clean up. Two thirds of all infrastructure is destroyed. The economy is halted and a significant share of farms is ruined. The few production facilities are destroyed. Schools, hospitals, cemeteries, and everything else that constitute Gaza were bombed. We know from the testimony of the chief physician of the Al-Shifa hospital, who was recently released after getting arrested last November, the unbelievable extent of Israeli torture of the Palestinians it takes hostage. Israel turned Palestine into hell!  

Israel did not, and could not, do all of this by itself. In particular, the US supplied Israel with over 12,5 billion dollars worth of aid since the onset of the genocide. It created and improved the Iron Dome that gave Israel its impunity. It constructed a pier in Gaza under the guise of humanitarian aid, but aided, instead, Israel in its operations and its soldiers even took part in massacres. It obstructed all attempts to provide relief to the Palestinian people in the United Nations. Likewise, Britain declared its unequivocal support of Israel’s massacres in Gaza in numerous instances. British airplanes have flown countless sorties to provide air support to Israeli operations since December. Britain provided intelligence for the US and Israel during the Nuseirat refugee camp massacre in May. Palestinians and their friends living in France and Germany were repressed, their demonstrations, meetings, Palestinian flags and even keffiyehs were banned! Germany was among the top weapon suppliers of Israel. During the genocide they increased their supplies to Israel ten-fold, let alone cutting it down on. It took Israel’s side in the ICC trial initiated by South Africa. Except Ireland, Spain and Norway, all European countries supported Israel unconditionally, except where imperialism disagreed on a tactical level, such as the Rafah operation and extending the war to Hezbollah. President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, parroted her unconditional support to Israel on every occasion.

And is this all? The post-coup president of Egypt, Sisi, scared to death of Palestinians and Hamas, was already among the principal implementers of the siege on Gaza. He flooded the tunnels sending supplies to Gaza in 2014, further isolating them. After the beginning of the genocide, he drew a line in the sand on forced emmigration of Palestinians to Egypt, without  harming his relations to Israel. Occasionally condemning the massacres, he nevertheless refrained from taking any action to stop it. Saudi Arabia paused its normalization with Israel, but made sure to signal a return to this policy post-war. The United Arab Emirates treated Israel with a favor to help circumvent the blockade of the Red Sea by Yemeni forces of Ansar Allah, building a land bridge from Dubai to Jaffa. This way, the losses of Israel were partially mitigated.

Are we done yet? No. The so-called allies of Hamas, and the guardian of Palestinian people, Qatar and the despotic regime in Turkey are among the supporters of Israel. One should not mistake Qatar as a steadfast ally of Hamas, simply because the political headquarters of Hamas is in Qatar. The relocation of Hamas from Syria to Qatar happened with the approval of the US. Qatar is home to the largest US military base in the region. It did not cease its trade with Israel even during the genocide. The despotic regime clinging on to its rule in Turkey, not only did not close the Kurecik radar base protecting Israel during the genocide, but did not even feign concern over the service of information from this base to Israel. Instead it was busy approving the membership of Sweden to NATO, awarding the NATO members for their complicity in genocide. The toiling people of Turkey protested in the streets for months to halt the trade with Israel, and the despotic regime ignored their call during the first 7 months of the genocide. Once the government saw the pushback in the local elections, it reluctantly announced the end of trade. But it was recently discovered that companies easily circumvented this ban. And, to this day, in the 9th month of the genocide, Israel gets most of its oil from Azerbaijan through Turkey.  

The victory of Palestinian people shall be our victory

All those listed above are open, unconditional supporters of Israel, albeit on different levels. All of them are the enemy of the Palestinian people as well as the toiling people in Turkey. As we repeatedly point out, workers and toilers in Turkey share the fate of the Palestinian people, they are inseparable allies. The bosses that get rich off of the trade with Israel are the very same ones that leech off of us. The soulmate of Zionism is the fascist movement in Turkey, the perpetrator of the massacres in Sivas, Corum and Maras. 

Our fight is for the victory of our ally. Our party, Revolutionary Workers Party (DIP), and its initiative Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism, plans and organizes systematic struggle against the despotism in Turkey, imperialism and Zionism, and we will continue to do so. Because our duties become ever more burning, ever more urgent with the passing days. Unable to secure victory over Hamas and making a fool of itself, Israel seeks to dial up its massacres in Gaza. An extensive land operation in Rafah may double the death toll. A similar failure is faced against Hezbollah in the north, and it seems Israel intends to take the war to Lebanon and perhaps occupy it again. This will only lead to more massacres. Even during its genocide, Israel is able to continue its propaganda efforts in Turkey, even becoming sponsors of festivals. Our toiling people face the pro-Israel propaganda of the opposition leader Ozgur Ozel, claiming Hamas to be a terror organization, as much as they face the hypocrisy of Erdogan’s despotism on Palestine. We are not obliged to endure this humiliation. Let us work tirelessly and make Turkey, West Asia and all of the world a hell for imperialism and Zionism! 

Ever since the onset of Operation al Aqsa Flood on October 7^th, 2023, the Zionists have been raising accusations of rape and sexual harassment of Israeli women by Palestinian freedom fighters. While no video or any other kind of evidence had been made publicly available for this accusation, countless examples of Israeli cruelty – sexual or otherwise – have been flooding social media around the world. Friends of the Palestinian liberation struggle have been demanding the evidence to stop the smear campaign against Palestinian freedom fighters. Zionists, on the other hand, have been raising nothing but unbacked stories to portray Palestinians as barbarians.

One unnamed Israeli paramedic interviewed by the New York Times on December 28^th has been one of the chief sources of this accusation. This medic had claimed to have found evidence of sexual abuse on the corpses of two partially clothed teenage women in the Be’eni settlement upon his investigation after October 7^th. So far, this statement has been among the main pillars of the accusation.

But the recently revealed video footage from the settlement taken by an Israeli soldier on the day of the attack belie this story. The video shows three fully clothed women with no signs of rape or harassment. Of course, it is not known whether the house in the video is the same house that the medic was referring to. Further investigation by Israeli communities themselves have also falsified the claim so far. Upon being contacted by the New York Times again, the anonymous medic declined to comment further, replying elusively that he wanted to put the attack behind him.

Meanwhile, circumstantial and limited visual evidence of Israeli rape, torture, and harassment has been mounting with no impact on the imperialist press. Not a single news article about Israeli cruelty has been released in the mainstream imperialist press, despite the livestreams by the victims themselves and their loved ones. The Zionists worldwide have been outspoken apologists of these well-founded accusations, claiming that indefensible things happen during wars. This double-standard, shameless attitude is enough to demonstrate how much of a sham Zionism rests on.

Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism held a press conference and protested the company named Medkon, which engages in maritime business between Turkey and Israel, on Saturday November 11^th, 2023, in Beylikdüzü, Ambarlı, Istanbul. The action took place in front of the Mardaş Port, which is one of the ports that Medkon Perla and Medkon Çanakkale (the two vessels that belong to Medkon) use to carry cargo to Israel, around the time when Medkon Perla had picked up the load and was about to leave. Israel’s ongoing genocide attempt at Gaza that claimed the lives of about 11.000 Palestinians thus far was condemned in the action. Friends of Palestine also pointed out that the Turkish-Israeli trade was going on undisturbedly, even in a time like this, as if nothing had happened.

Friends of Palestine stated in the press conference that the bourgeoisie who continues its trade with Israel has only one motive, i.e., profit. They also emphasized that the shipment of the goods to Israel, while the massacre in Gaza is still going on, should be thought of in the same way as the Soma mine massacre in Turkey nine years ago, where the refusal of the company to take preventative measures to protect its profits cost the lives of 300 workers. Erdoğan and his despotic regime, who have done nothing concrete since the beginning of the massacre, were also called out, and were demanded to cut all ties with Israel and halt the trade. The real call of Friends of Palestine was, however, on the longshore workers. The longshore workers were called on to take heed from their Belgian class brothers and sisters, take organized action, and refuse to load and unload cargo from the ships that commute between Israel and Turkey. Longshore workers also joined the action and raised their voices against Israel.

 Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism’s spokesman Kutlu Dane made the following statement on behalf of the platform:

Boycott against Israel, freedom for Palestine!

No to trade with the Zionist, genocidal, ethnic-cleanser Israel!

Over 10,500 dead, with 4,300 of them children;

Over 26,000 wounded;

Thousands of people who fled to save their lives but were massacred by bombs dropped from above;

Neighborhoods, streets, a whole infrastructure destroyed by bombs dropped from the sky;

18 hospitals rendered inoperable by fuel blockade;

People massacred, dismembered, their bodies torn apart while waiting around the hospitals that did survive…

Just last night Israel massacred a host of civilians, mostly children, by targeting the Shifa hospital in Gaza.

The culprit for all this is the Zionist State of Israel.

While committing these crimes for a month now, this state has also tightened its blockade on the millions of Palestinians living in Gaza even further, almost depriving them of even drinking water, and thus engaged in genocide. Almost no human necessity has been allowed to enter Gaza throughout this month. If even a few aid trucks have been able to enter, what rendered this possible is actions such as this one, where masses all around the world demonstrated their rage against Israel. In the face of this reaction, Israel has been forced to allow some supplies to enter Gaza, however inadequate.

But this situation does not change the fact that Israel is engaged in a genocide in Gaza, accompanied by a relentless blockade!

And while all this is going on, here today at Marport, hundreds of containers are loaded onto the Medkon Perla, a vessel that belongs to the firm Medon, to reach the Port of Ashdod in Israel in a week. Another vessel that belongs to the same company, Medkon Çanakkale, also regularly carries large cargos to Israel. Many other companies play roles in the trade with Israel. But unlike Medkon, they keep their activities secret. We, Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism, protest mutual maritime trade between the ports of Turkey and Israel!

This trade is rewarding and strengthening Israel, which is strangling the people of Palestine, who are the friends and allies of our toiling people. This allows Israel to carry on with its massacres without any accountability for its crimes. However, defending their land against an enemy supported by the entirety of imperialism, the Palestinian people are asking their friends all over the world to support them in their struggle by any means necessary.

Arming the Palestinian people against its enemy is a legitimate way of support. The Palestinians today understand very well who supplies the weapons they use in self-defense, and who limits himself to the cries of “one minute”, putting on the façade of a so-called protector, and then stabs them in the back.

But as important as this is the boycott, sanctions, and divestment that the Palestinians have been demanding for years. Known as BDS in its acronym form, this set of activities brought the Apartheid South Africa to its knees in the past. It is evident that this act would have important consequences for Israel also, which, like South Africa, also has a relatively small economy. Specifically, today it would be effective immediately in stopping Israel’s massacre.

Therefore, what is needed today is not to keep up with the trade with Israel as if nothing happened, but to block Israel’s access to certain goods and services. The bosses who run the port behind us and send shipments here have proven once again that their only motive is profit, that they cannot have any ethical and conscientious criteria by continuing the trade with Israel in a time like this. The bourgeoisie, who yesterday massacred 300 workers in Soma by declining to take measures to protect their profit, is today supplying necessities from this port to a state that is currently attempting genocide, again to protect its profits.

We call on the workers on this port and all longshore workers of Turkey. Israel is the enemy of us, the workers and toilers. At the heart of capitalism, the system that allows for our exploitation by the bosses, and the robbing of our labor by a handful of parasites, lie the imperialist backers of Israel. When Israel wins, imperialism and capitalism win, and we lose. Therefore, our side is that of the Palestinian people. Let us take heed of the longshore workers in Belgium who refuse to load ships that carry goods to Israel and unite to organize and do the same thing in the ports of Turkey. Do not load the vessels Perla and Çanakkale, do not unload the incoming cargo!

We also call on the government and Erdoğan, who do nothing against the great slaughter the Palestinians face other than uttering lofty words and preparing parades. It is not as if he does not know of the Palestinian people’s call for support. But throughout his stay in power, far from taking steps against Israel, the two countries broke trade records, constantly improved their military and intelligence relations, and were actively approaching one another leading up to the al-Aqsa Flood on October 7^th. The flood caught Erdoğan just in the act of fixing all the quirks with Israel and becoming partners in stealing the Palestinian natural gas. Turkey must abandon this policy immediately and end all military, commercial, diplomatic, and academic ties with Israel.

Of course, this cannot be done by appearing to be on the same side as Palestine but working for the interests of NATO and imperialism, who are siding with Israel. The government that claims to be on the Palestinians’ side must shut down the Kurecik military base used by Israel, not the Constitutional Court. If the parliamentarians in the National Assembly are on the side of the Palestinian people, then they must make sure that the Incirlik Airbase – which was used to load fuel to the aircraft that bombed that very same Assembly on July 15^th – is shut down, reject Sweden’s NATO membership – which is a project to strengthen NATO –and thus give the adequate response to Israel and the US!

We, the Friends of Palestine against Imperialism and Zionism, are on the side of the Palestinian people, who are friends to our toiling people. We are fighting for their liberation and their victory over Zionism. We are calling on our people to support this struggle. The Palestinian people will triumph; the imperialists, Zionists, and their local allies will be vanquished!

End the maritime trade of Medkon Perla and Medkon Çanakkale with Israel!

Total mobilization against Zionism in the ports of Turkey!

Cut all commercial ties with Israel!

Cut all military ties with Israel!

Turkey out of NATO!

Shut down the Kurecik and Incirlik bases!

Down with the Zionist State of Israel!

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

As of today, the Palestinian resistance forces, led by the Al-Qassam Brigades, have initiated a historic offensive against Israel. Forces moving along a front extending up to 25 kilometers beyond Gaza, surrounding the Gaza Strip, have launched a lightning operation by land, sea, and air. On the first day of the operation, at least three settlements and a number of military posts under Israeli occupation have fallen into the hands of the Palestinian resistance. Clashes continue in about 20 settlements. While the armed wing of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, spearheads the offensive, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Islamic Jihad also took part in operations. The resistance has taken many Israeli soldiers, including high-ranking Zionist commanders, as prisoners and appears to have seized dozens of tanks and armored vehicles, as indicated by videos circulating online.

It is difficult to predict how the offensive will unfold. The youth of the West Bank, including in Jerusalem, have heeded to Hamas’s call for action, but these actions are still limited in scale. Hezbollah has stated that it is in communication with resistance commanders but has not yet signaled any intention to participate in the operations. It is likely that Israel will launch a major counteroffensive in the near future. Regardless of the outcome of this counterattack, it is clear that this offensive, known as the “Aqsa Deluge,” represents a significant tactical setback for occupying Israel. Furthermore, the presence of captured Israeli soldiers provides the resistance with a powerful bargaining chip, even if the Zionists manage to reclaim the seized settlements.

At the same time, indiscriminate Israeli bombings have begun against Gaza. Already, hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including children, have lost their lives in Israel’s attacks on densely populated urban centers. The death toll in Gaza seems bound to increase. While Western nations shamelessly rush to condemn the Palestinian resistance’s attacks on military targets, Israel started blatantly killing hundreds of innocent people, including women and children. We unequivocally stand with the people of Gaza against these inhumane attacks. Gaza has the right to defend itself!

This offensive have also exposed the hypocrisy of Middle Eastern states, from Turkey to Saudi Arabi, from the UAE to Egypt, who started calling for restraint. Shame on them for calling for restraint when Palestinian people is fighting for their homeland. We call for victory, not restraint. Regardless of the direct military consequences, this offensive, like the Tet Offensive of Vietnam’s brave revolutionaries, will go down in history as a turning point on the path to a people’s liberation. We salute the Palestinian people’s Tet offensive!

Down with Zionist Israel!

Free Palestine from the river to the sea!

Victory or victory!

In the January issue of the newspaper Gerçek (Truth), the Turkish language newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP), a piece was published on the reactionary nature of the new Israeli government, established under Benjamin Netanyahu’s premiership. Now, for the last few months, this government’s desire to take control of the Israeli judiciary has dragged the country into a major crisis. The most important pillar of this is the draft bill prepared to deprive the Supreme Court of its power to exercise oversight and to give the executive branch a decisive say in the selection of the members of this court. This is another case of rapidly multiplying powers all across the world that defy the rule of law. Moreover, in this way, Netanyahu is trying to avoid corruption allegations against him. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

The arrangement resulted in masses taking to the streets in opposition to the reactionary government. In addition, Israel’s closest allies, both the U.S. administration and the U.S. Jewish community, began to react to this attempt, first diplomatically and then openly. The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, also displayed fierce opposition. Finally, inside the Netanyahu government, the Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant went public on Sunday, March 26, stating that this step puts Israel’s security in peril.

Netanyahu’s dismissed the Minister of Defense in response. This led to the sudden eruption of large demonstrations on Sunday, March 26, alongside the demonstrations that have been taking place every Saturday for weeks. On Monday, 80 thousand people took to the streets spontaneously.

In the end, the reactionary coalition at the helm of Israel seems to have stepped back in the face of this backlash. At least for the moment being. Netanyahu announced that the bill was delayed until the next parliament session (that is, mid-April). In doing so, he made another concession to Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of his most reactionary partners, who played an important role in the dismissal of the Minister of Defense. Ben-Gvir, who is sitting in the seat of the Ministry of National Security, has been demanding the establishment of a militia which would answer to him directly and whose purpose would be aggression against Palestinians. And indeed, he got his way.

What does the crisis of Zionism mean for Palestine?

We have just stated the first outcomes of the crisis of Zionism. The fact that Ben-Gvir will have the authority to establish a “National Guard” can only bring about worse massacres for the Palestinians.

However, one should further elaborate on the question. Can a beneficial result come from the sharpening of the internal contradictions of the Zionist enemy and thus weakening it to some extent? To answer this particular question, it is important to know the reasons leading to the resignation of the Minister of Justice in the reactionary government, Yariv Levin, which is the culmination of these internal contradictions. There are two main reasons for the resignation. The first is that the army is also split into two fractions in the face of the bill and this will create some weakness. Secondly, the possibility exists that the disappearance of the “independence” of the Israeli judiciary will lead the soldiers of the Zionist army to be tried in international courts. In other words, one strand of the opposition to the government’s seizure of the judiciary stems from the concern that it will work against the occupation of Palestine and harm Zionism.

The Arab people have succinctly summarized the “democracy” demands in Israeli demonstrations. Israelis are practically saying: “Democracy for us! Apartheid for the Palestinians!” After all, the laws that the protesters are trying to preserve are the ones that are the basis of ethnic cleansing, collective punishment of the Palestinians, administrative detention of the Palestinians, and the Apartheid system in general! There are outlier objections that confront these loves, but they are rather weak!

Wherever there is movement, there is hope!

But it should not be forgotten that the consciousness of the masses does change in action. To say that this struggle of the hundreds of thousands is unlikely to lead to any change in consciousness goes against the great dialectic between practice and consciousness. Something interesting happened in the gigantic mass struggles. The national trade union center in Israel, Histadrut, has recently declared a general strike, although, at first sight, the issue had nothing to do with the class issues. The bosses’ organization immediately opposed this. Perhaps one of the important reasons why Netanyahu took steps to cool the problem was the possibility of the struggle unexpectedly turning into a class struggle. Yes, Histadrut is a Zionist organization. But one should not underestimate the possibility that the general strike would go far beyond the will of the ones who triggered it.

When Netanyahu suspended the issue, the general strike became moot. But, just for now. The question stands: If the Israeli working class were to take part in this gigantic mass action, could both the character of the action and the consciousness of the masses who have carried out the actions transform? The struggle that will be revived after mid-April could provide us with the answer to this question.