Expelling All Arabs / Bottomless Crypto Support For Reform UK / Next Up A Supersized El Niño / ICE Coming Soon To A Polling Place Near You / Flock Cameras the New Instrument of Mass Surveillance
This Israeli Government Wants to Expel Every Arab
Haaretz
Charles: Writing in Haaretz, Israel’s finest newspaper, veteran journalist Amira Haas argues her county isn’t debating a Palestinian State, ”it’s preparing for Expulsion.”
Hass has lived in the occupied territories for more than thirty years, and first started comparing Israeli policies with apartheid in 2006.
An Israeli settler herding sheep in the West Bank and recording Palestinian villagers as they filmed him.
Gadi Eisenkot, the election frontrunner and leader of the Yashar party, has a stance on a Palestinian state that is ultimately irrelevant. What is at stake today is not a “diplomatic solution,” but the very existence of the Palestinian people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Israeli forces striving to “erase” them recognize no limits or restraints. Their supporters are too numerous for us to rely solely on the steadfastness and resilience of a people that has already endured expulsion plans carried out by Israel.
The world stands by. The left is tiny, weak and hoarse from sounding too many warnings. The anti-Bibi opposition oscillates among downplaying the danger, remaining indifferent to it and outright supporting expulsion.
The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.
“Erasure” is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians’ declarations, militaryorders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this “solution” diligently and without fear of international condemnation.
Israeli policy is directed toward making life unbearable for Palestinians wherever they live, so that their emigration can be described as an act of free will. Within Israel itself, the authorities give Arab crime organizations free rein to arm themselves and kill Palestinian citizens in their homes. In the West Bank, those same Israeli authorities give “God’s battalions” free rein to arm themselves, kill and expel, while the official army continues its raids day and night. In devastated and thirsty Gaza, the government and the army cultivate armed militias of criminal collaborators, while Israeli pilots continue to launch missiles of revenge and retribution that claim the lives of still more children. All these testosterone-fueled displays are interconnected.
At the same time, Israel is destroying or severely restricting Palestinians’ ability to earn a living. In Gaza, that mission has been completed. A “living dead” population of aid recipients, two million people carrying the weight of some 74,000 fresh graves, families and memories, talents and professions, and evaporated savings, is crammed into roughly 150 square kilometers of scorched earth. Creativity, resourcefulness and mutual aid are dwarfed by the scale of the destruction and by Israel’s prohibition on rebuilding and recovery.
In the West Bank, the Finance Ministry’s financial noose is tightening around the necks of approximately three million people and the Palestinian Authority. The systematic theft of revenues is compounded by the army’s campaigns of destruction in cities and refugee camps, as well as by the other methods used to prevent Palestinians from cultivating and developing their land: checkpoints, bureaucratic prohibitions, fences and Israeli-Jewish shepherds.
Within Israel itself, the “Judaization of the Galilee and Negev” was and remains code for stealing land and resources from Palestinian citizens of Israel. Discrimination against them in allocations, subsidies and employment, along with building prohibitions and demolitions, has always featured prominently in official policy within the Green Line.
Let me reiterate: The very existence of the Palestinian people between the sea and the river is now in danger. Too many active forces are creating that danger: Israel’s military might andcapabilities; the cult of military service under all conditions and under every government; obedience as a value; weapons and military attacks as the default modus operandi; the normalization of PTSD among soldiers and of soldiers dying by suicide; the attractions of a military career and the doors it opens; the lure of an affordable villa in a Galilee exclusionary community or a settler suburb in Samaria; the falsehoods of official and unofficial propaganda; indifference to the hell on earth Israel has created in the Gaza Strip; denial of 60 years of occupation and forced rule; the Pavlovian response, “But October 7”; the synergy among the army, the government, the rabbis and the kippa-wearing militias in the West Bank; equanimity in the face of Lebanon’s destruction; disregard for the occupation of more parts of Syria; the normalization of expulsion discourse; justice and education systems tainted by secular and religious racism; and the army of jailers who abuse thousands of Palestinian prisoners, both under orders and by choice.
My brother David Kaiser, an historian and the author of eleven books, believes the Israeli government never intended to remain within its original 1949 borders. “Authors from Benny Morris (Righteous Victims) to Eli Clifton and Ian Lustick (Israel’s Lobby) have left no doubt about that. Since 1967 there has been only one brief period when they seriously considered giving up a lot of the West Bank. Since then they haven’t had any interest in a two state solution. It does seem to me they are moving to the final step of expelling most of the Arabs.”
Meanwhile The New York Times reports a growing number of retired Israeli generals are condemning the violence against Palestinians inside Gaza and the West Bank. They are part of “a small but rapidly expanding array of influential Israelis, including many from the upper echelons of the military and intelligence apparatus, who are publicly declaring the lawlessness in the West Bank a threat to Israel’s existence as a democracy.”
“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.
“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”
Reform received £5.3m in donations and most was from crypto tycoons
The Times
Nigel Farage and his Reform cabinet. Photo: Richard Pohle/The Times
Scott: So how has the rise of crypto influenced politics in the developed world? We have some very colorful chapters in this narrative, like the rise of the crypto-fueled Palestinian émigré and friend of Trump Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, the president for life of El Salvador. But among the major democracies, a series of exposés by The Times, The Guardian and independent journalists in the UK has provided a first deep look. What we learn is this: the crypto brothers have found that they could buy and fuel a “populist” party and send it ballooning to success—the name of the party is Reform UK, and its crypto friendly leader is Nigel Farage. What do the crypto bros want in exchange? That’s very murky at this point. But it is clear that they are very keen on relaxing restrictions on money laundering—which is after all the raison d’être of crypto—and Reform UK is only all too happy to pursue this, uh, “reform.”
Reform UK received more than £5 million of donations in the second quarter of this year, including £4 million from a cryptocurrency billionaire and £75,000 from a company linked to the co-owner of Chelsea football club.
Nigel Farage’s party received £5.3 million and the bulk of it came from Ben Delo, who relocated from Hong Kong to the UK so that he could continue giving money.
There were no donations from Christopher Harborne, another cryptocurrency billionaire who is based in Thailand and had previously given the party more than £9 million. He is at the centre of an investigation by parliament’s watchdog into a £5 million gift he gave Farage shortly before he became an MP.
The parliamentary commissioner for standards is investigating whether the gift should have been declared. Farage says that he did not need to declare it. The government has announced a £100,000 annual cap on political donations from British citizens living abroad.
The donations to Reform eclipsed the other parties. Labour received £3.5 million, the Conservatives £2.8 million and the Liberal Democrats £1.3 million.
Reform also received £75,000 from a company linked to Todd Boehly, the co-owner of Chelsea football club. Boehly is chief executive and co-founder of Eldridge Industries. Eldridge Capital Management Services, a company which is ultimately controlled by Boehly, made the donation to Reform.
Other significant donations included £180,000 from Bassim Haider, a telecoms entrepreneur and former Tory donor, and £100,000 from Johan Christofferson, a hedge fund manager who previously donated to Boris Johnson.
Labour received £550,000 each from two long-standing donors — Gary Lubner, the billionaire founder of Autoglass, and Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the supermarket billionaire who has long been Labour’s biggest backer.
‘Supersizing before our eyes’: UN warns of record El Niño approaching
The Guardian
Scott: Major US corporate media are under great pressure not to talk about climate change, and indeed, to deny it. And this they are only too happy to accommodate. But climate change has now led to the creation of a record-breaking el Niño, and the world is already seeing what damage it can unleash. The Guardian offers an introduction here.
The El Niño climate phenomenon is “supersizing before our eyes”, the UN has said. The event is near certain to shatter temperature records, according to the latest forecasts.
The El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere where temperatures are already rising rapidly due to global heating. The combination means 2027 is set to “blow apart” the record and be the hottest year ever recorded.
The rising heat from the El Niño is already having impacts, from worsening wildfires in Indonesia to the weakening of vital monsoon rains in India. The impacts will spread globally, from greater fire risk in Australia to more intense floods in South America. The World Food Programme said in August that the El Niño was likely to push about 50 million people into acute hunger.
The climate crisis, caused by pollution from fossil fuels, is already supercharging extreme weather and killing people, with the most extreme heatwave ever recorded hitting Europe this summer and leading to at least 35,000 deaths. The El Niño will ratchet up the impacts even further, with the scale of the event having been described as “truly mind-blowing” and a “Godzilla-level” event.
El Niño is a natural climate cycle where wind changes over the Pacific lead to rising ocean temperatures and the transfer of huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere. The most recent data, from Monday, shows the temperature of the ocean at the heart of El Niño at 2.6C above the 30-year average. That is already close to the highest anomaly ever recorded in the satellite data era, 3.1C in 2015, with months to go before the peak is expected.
That peak is forecast to reach about 4C in November, according to the average of 14 different models. Data from analysis of corals, tree rings and historical documents suggest no El Niño has reached this level in the last millennium, said Zeke Hausfather, a climate analyst. Any temperature anomaly above 0.5C is classed as an El Niño.
A further concern is that recent research shows global heating is now intensifying El Niño cycles, which then in turn intensify the impacts of the climate crisis.
“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” said UN secretary general António Guterres. “The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. The world is in the danger zone of extreme weather. The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people. We must win that race.”
“El Niño has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world,” said Celeste Saulo, Secretary-General of the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). “We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies.”
ICE Lays the Foundation for the Trump Administration’s Enemies List
Wired
Scott: There’s good reason to expect that Trump will deploy his secret police, known as ICE, to the polls around time for the midterm elections. Indeed, at a press conference yesterday, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullins refused to deny that. And to help ICE with its new role of master of ensured-outcomes for the elections, ICE hey Siri, what time is it? Hey Siri what time is it is now looking to start the creation of an enemies list for the White House. As usual, the cover for this venture is an effort to target voter fraud—which has nothing whatsoever to do with ICE’s supposed mission of immigration enforcement.
In a bid to tackle alleged voter fraud, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will create a massive national database of voters.
ICE first detailed what the contract would entail in a document published last week. “The purpose of this acquisition is for the handling and secure delivery of publicly available voter registration files and voter history files to support Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) fraud detection and data segmentation activities,” the document reads.
In the document, ICE says that the agency will initially provide a list of specific states it wants to acquire public voter registration files from, though the successful contractor will need to have the capability to obtain data from all 50 states. ICE is also seeking voting history data “for each federal election specified by the government, including general, primary, runoff, and special federal elections.” ICE is seeking publicly available information from each state, which each have their own rules around how it is obtained. This would include voter registration, and in many cases, voting history. Either could potentially include party affiliation—a move that experts believe will violate a right to privacy for US voters.
The document states that the successful contractor won’t be asked to collect and share party affiliation data fields for voters but that could change if “explicitly directed in writing by the contracting officer.” That contracting officer is listed as Michael Royer, section chief at Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative unit within ICE. ICE, DHS, and Royer did not respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, the agency published an acquisition forecast document that revealed the ICE contract would be worth between $2 million and $5 million. The final contract is expected to be published next Monday, and is likely to be awarded soon after, given that the term of the contract will expire on September 30.
ICE’s effort to create a national voter database is part of a much broader effort within the Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration to undermine trust in the upcoming midterm elections. For more than a year, the Department of Justice has been seeking to create a national voter database by demanding states hand over unredacted voters rolls. States and courts, however, have pushed back.
