To celebrate Cities Day, the U.N. has revealed the change in those living in urban areas, from 1950 to 2020.
Africa and Asia — which already have urban populations bigger in total than those in Europe, Latin America or North America — have been increasing their share of urban dwellers most in the last 70 years.
While in 1950, less than 20 percent of Africans and Asians lived in cities, that number had increased to 43 percent and 51 percent, respectively, by 2020 South America also increased urban populations majorly during the same time period, arriving at an urban population share of more than 80 percent – higher than that of Europe.
Overall, more people in the world live in urban than in rural setting since 2010. In 2020, 56.2 percent of the world population was urban.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/global-continent-urban-population-urbanisation-percent/
Omdat nu de meerderheid van de bevolking op aarde in steeds omvangrijkere stedelijke gebieden wonen, blijft het belang van ‘urban warfare’ almaar toenemen. Dat hoge westerse militairen, de bureaucratie, en politici zich voorbereiden op dit verschijnsel bleek ondermeer op donderdag 29 april 2021 toen de Amerikaanse financiële website ZeroHedge het volgende berichtte:
Paris Mayor Backs Military Chiefs Who Threatened To Seize Control From Macron Over Inaction On Radical Islam.
A Paris Mayor who was raised in a devout Muslim household by Algerian immigrant parents threw her support behind a controversial letter by current and former military chiefs who said that if nothing is done about the ‘laxist' (lakse. svh) policies on radical Islam, it would require ‘the intervention of our comrades on active duty in a perilous mission of protection of our civilizational values.’
‘What is written in this letter is a reality,’ Mayor Rachida Dati of Paris' 7th arrondissement told France Info radio. ‘When you have a country plagued by urban guerrilla warfare, when you have a constant and high terrorist threat, when you have increasingly glaring and flagrant inequalities... we cannot say that the country is doing well.’
‘The hour is grave, France is in peril,’ reads the letter, adding that failure to act against the ‘suburban hordes’ would lead to 'civil war’ and deaths ‘in the thousands.’
The letter was signed by hundreds of retired soldiers, including 20 retired generals, as well as several active duty members of the military
Ook de Nederlandse staat houdt al geruime tijd rekening met de toekomstige ‘urban warfare,’ door in NAVO-verband de belangen van allereerst de westerse neoliberale elite veilig te stellen. Zo meldde de website Dutch Defense Press al acht jaar geleden dat:
Van zondag 28 oktober tot en met donderdag 15 november 2012 de gehele 104 Commandotroepen-compagnie op oefening geweest [is] in Israël. Doelstellingen van de oefening waren het trainen en uitbreiden van de vaardigheden op het gebied van Special Operations Urban Terrain (SOUT) en het trainen van het Contra-Terreur Systeem (CT-Systeem)…
Het oefendorp waar de 104 drie weken getraind heeft, was ter grootte van een ‘echt’ dorp. Negen verschillende districten hadden ieder hun eigen kenmerkende bebouwing. Voor het trainen van SOUT was dit een ideale trainingslocatie. In favela achtige wijken tot middelgrote flatgebouwen konden de verplaatsingstechnieken en contact-drills worden beoefend. Waar in Nederland in Marnewaard en Oostdorp relatief eenzijdige tactieken voldoende zijn om de missie succesvol te behalen, bleek het in Israël een ware uitdaging om te spelen met de diverse aangeleerde technieken en tactieken. In de eerste week konden de teams zelfstandig trainen, middels het force-on-force principe. In de tweede week werden de ploegen en de commandant meervoudig ploegoptreden getraind in grote scenario’s. Door het vroeg invallen van de duisternis is ook het nachtoptreden maximaal getraind. De 104 heeft wat betreft het SOUT in deze twee weken een grote stap voorwaarts gemaakt.
https://www.dutchdefencepress.com/104-commandotroepencompagnie-traint-in-israel/
Kortom, Nederlandse militairen leren van hun Israelische collega’s — die talloze malen van oorlogsmisdaden en misdaden tegen de menselijkheid zijn beschuldigd — hoe ‘te spelen met de diverse aangeleerde technieken en tactieken’ om de tegenstander zo snel en effectief mogelijk kalt te stellen, zoals de Israelische militairen ongestraft doen met Palestijnse jongeren. Op 25 mei 2018 werd bekend dat Israelische scherpschutters die dag 55 Palestijnse jongeren in Gaza hadden dood geschoten, velen in de rug, en 2,700 Palestijnen hadden verwond, van wie een aanzienlijk aantal voor het leven werd verminkt, het resultaat van het ‘spelen met diverse aangeleerde technieken,’ waarover nu ook de Nederlandse strijdkrachten beschikken zodra zij in NAVO-verband ergens in Afrika of Azië de kapitalistische ‘orde’ moeten handhaven. In plaats van dat Europa, na de uiterst bloeddorstige twintigste eeuw, minder moordzuchtig de 21ste eeuw inging, zijn de Europese NAVO-leden all dressed up voor de nog massalere bloedbaden van de toekomst. Mede dankzij de Apartheidsstaat Israel. Dit is dan ook exact de reden waarom Brussel en Washington niets concreets ondernemen tegen de oorlogsmisdaden en de misdaden tegen de menselijkheid van de zionistische schurkenstaat. Het is het cynisme van de postmoderne westerse wereld, waarin de 74-jarige wedergeboren christen Geert Mak enerzijds pleit voor ‘Kwaliteit, empathie en courage, ja, dat hebben wij, als elite, in deze tijd nodig,’ en daarnaast waarschuwt dat ‘wij, chroniqueurs van het heden en verleden, onze taak, het “uitbannen van onwaarheid,”’ niet ‘serieus genoeg’ nemen, terwijl volgens hem op ‘dit moment op Europees en mondiaal niveau een misvorming van de werkelijkheid plaats[vindt] die grote consequenties heeft,’ maar anderzijds zich muisstil houdt over het feit dat het Westen de Israelische terreur politiek, financieel en zelfs militair steunt. En dat terwijl mijn oude vriend de gotspe heeft te beweren dat de ‘kracht van onze westerse samenleving onze democratie [is], onze variatie in ideeën, onze tolerantie, onze openheid tegenover andere culturen. Maar dat is tegelijk onze kwetsbaarheid, blijkt nu ook weer,’ aldus verklaarde hij na de aanslag op de redactie van Charlie Hebdo.
the Israelis were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 that states that Palestinian ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.’
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/
Net als ik, maar dan langduriger en vaker, is Hedges getuige geweest van de Israëlische terreur. Hij schrijft:
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as The New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison where over two million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation — the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas,
een feit dat maar niet wil doordringen in het gecorrumpeerde bewustzijn van degenen die in dienst staan van de commerciële media, en die tot eerste en belangrijkste taak hebben zoveel mogelijk winst te maken voor de eigenaren van de krant, tijdschrift, radio- of televisiezender. De diep geïnternaliseerde zelfcensuur heeft mijn collega’s blind gemaakt voor de werkelijkheid, hun bewustzijn vertroebeld, en hun propaganda weerzinwekkend. Zij zijn niet bij machte om — net als Hedges — het volgende te zien:
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second class citizens or live under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an Apartheid State.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects, and this is true in the United States, always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test known as the Three D’s: the making of statements that ‘demonize’ Israel; statements that apply ‘double standards’ for Israel; statements that ‘delegitimize’ the state of Israel. This definition of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses. The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish; and university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia, China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera four-part series ‘The Lobby.’ Israel managed to block ‘The Lobby’ from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is available on the website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining how they, backed by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics and use massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the unconstitutional invitation by then-House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38 billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive American politics is to Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and its backers is worth it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20 years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history, accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious (leugenachtige. svh) Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real anti-Semites.
https://scheerpost.com/2021/05/14/chris-hedges-israel-the-big-lie/
Experience in developing new modes of urban fighting developed during ‘Operation Defensive Shield,’ which was launched on 29 March 2002, after a series of suicide attacks on Israeli cities. The stated aim of Defensive Shield was to dismantle what the Israeli security establishment called the ‘infrastructure of terror' located in the cities and refugee camps of the West Bank. The attacks targeted, and extensively destroyed, different Palestinian urban environments — the modern city of Ramallah, a dense historic city centre at the Kasbah of Nablus, an international city in Bethlehem, and refugee camps in Jenin, Balata and Tu-Qarem.
These attacks were of significant interest to foreign military forces, especially the American and British as they geared themselves to the occupation of Iraq — In recent years hundreds of corps officers have been trained in Israel in urban warfare and targeted assassinations in what the military crudely refers to as ‘population management’ — a term broad enough to incorporate the spectrum of military occupation, from the enforcement of extended curfews to the management of civil affairs.
Given the international outcry that followed the April 2002 destruction of the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, the Israeli military realized that it had to push its engineering corps to improve its ‘art of destruction,’ which had apparently spun out of control. As a part of these efforts, in June 2002 two months after the attack on Jenin, the military began to upgrade a small mock-up town it called Chicago (in homage to that other bullet-ridden city). Located in the Tze’elim base in the Negev desert, this was to become the world’s largest mock-up oriental city erected since the filming of ‘Ben-Hur.’ In fact the ‘urban’ history of Chicago goes back even further and has shadowed much of the history of the military operations that took place in the Middle East since the 1980s, reflecting changes in the imagination of the military force and in relation to cities. The history of Chicago could be understood by reference to the gradual transformation of its signified environment — those places upon which it had been modelled. The core of Chicago was built in the early 1980s as a small training site simulating a Lebanese village, at a time when Israeli forces were occupying Lebanon. It was extended into a larger urban environment to accommodate the training of special forces in their operation to assassinate Saddam Hussein in Tiqrit. The operation was aborted after several Israeli soldiers were killed in an accident. What had been a small Lebanese village was transformed into a section of an Iraqi town. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Chicago was further expanded to offer a blueprint for different types of Palestinian urban environment. It now includes an area called the Kasbah, a section simulating a refugee camp, a downtown neighborhood with broad streets, a section resembling a rural village, a dense market area with narrow alleys, and urban outskirts. For special training sessions, and to make the site look realistic and alive, the military employs a stage-set designer normally employed in a well known Tel Aviv theatre to provide and organize the relevant props and effects.
In similar mock-up sites, simulations have been designed by fun-fair, theme-park and filmset specialists. Action film directors are brought in to help military planners think up possible scenarios for complex urban fights. Soldiers, actors, civilians — and sometimes prisoners — simulate urban crowds. Special effects and ‘cold-fire’ systems, recordings of urban life, the sounds of planes, tanks and gunfire, and the revolting combination of smells from cooking, decomposing bodies, sewage and stagnant water are released throughout this and other mockup cities, to give military forces a ‘taste’ of the ‘urban mayhem’ of refugee camps and urban slums.
Zo bereidt de NAVO zich in Israel voor op de toekomstige slachtpartijen. Dit gegeven is uiteindelijk de ware reden waarom Israel, in strijd met het internationaal recht, de Palestijnse burgerbevolking als proefkonijn mag gebruiken in het hermetisch van de buitenwereld afgesloten laboratorium dat Gaza heet. Daar worden nieuwe militaire strategieën, tactieken, en wapens uitgeprobeerd om te ontdekken wat de efficiëntste manier is om stedelijke massa’s met geweld te beheersen. Het fascisme is weer op volle kracht terug, en ditmaal zijn het de zionisten die de dr. Mengele’s van de 21ste eeuw zijn. Zo herhaalt de geschiedenis zich, en de ironie van het lot. Dat is de doorslaggevende reden waarom de Nederlandse volksvertegenwoordiging en de Nederlandse pers muisstil is over hetgeen dat in Gaza gebeurt. Net als de NRC-correspondente Jannie Schipper, komen zij niet verder dan een Israëlische schuilkelder waar ze flink uitpakken over het leed van de Joods-Israelisch bevolking. Ook op die manier werkt de zelfcensuur en de staatsterreur. Er is niets veranderd.
Met het oog op de toekomstige oorlogen die in megasteden zullen worden uitgevochten accepteren de Europese Unie en de VS de gewelddadige experimenten van de Israëlische strijdkrachten in het dichtbevolkte en hermetisch afgesloten Palestijnse concentratiekamp Gaza. De zionistische staat mag van Brussel, het EU-bolwerk en het hoofdkwartier van de NAVO, als van Washington, waar zowel het Witte Huis als het Pentagon zijn gevestigd, allerlei nieuwe militaire strategieën uitproberen die het verzet moeten breken van de Palestijnse bevolking tegen de neokoloniale terreur. De NAVO-banden met de ‘Joodse staat,’ zoals het land — waar eenvijfde van de bevolking Palestijns is — zich zo graag betitelt, worden steeds hechter, ondanks het feit dat Israel weigert het internationaal recht te respecteren en doorgaat met het bezetten van de Westbank en de geconfisqueerde Golan Hoogvlakte. Hoewel in mei 2014 Amnesty International bekend maakte dat wederom ‘Israel Committed War Crimes In Gaza Conflict… saying it displayed "callous indifference" in attacks on family homes in the densely populated coastal area,’ waarbij ‘more than 2,100 Palestinians’ werden gedood, de meesten van hen ‘civilians according to Palestinian and U.N. officials,’ onder wie 490 kinderen, heeft het ‘beschaafde, democratische’ Westen zijn politieke, economische en zelfs militaire steun aan dit terrorisme niet gestopt. Nogmaals, de reden is simpelweg het feit dat Gaza en de Westbank gebieden zijn waar de meest effectieve manier wordt getest om ‘urban warfare’ te voeren, zodat de geglobaliseerde westerse economische en geopolitieke elite-belangen zo lang mogelijk kunnen worden 'veilig gesteld.' Het zal ook niemand kunnen verbazen dat in verband daarmee maandag 19 mei 2014 de Nederlandse staat bekend maakte: ‘Minister Hennis bezoekt Israël.’
Minister van Defensie Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert bezoekt tot en met morgen Israël. Doel daarvan is het markeren van de goede betrekkingen met Israël op het gebied van Defensie. Hennis arriveerde gisteren.
Vanmorgen sprak zij met haar ambtgenoot minister Moshe Ya’alon over de lopende militaire samenwerking.
Beide Defensieministers ondertekenden een verklaring dat zij streven naar afspraken over de status van ingezette militairen en over uitvoeringsaspecten, zoals de financiën…
Op dit moment werkt Nederland met Israël op een aantal gebieden samen. Zo maakt het Korps Commandotroepen dit jaar opnieuw gedurende enkele weken gebruik van Israëlische trainingsfaciliteiten. Dit gebeurde eerder in 2012. Ook is er uitwisseling van kennis:
over technische aspecten van op afstand bestuurbare vliegtuigen;
over maatregelen tegen geïmproviseerde explosieven (IED's) en
over cyber.
Verder is er wederzijdse deelname aan cursussen, trainingen en seminars. De activiteiten stroken met het kabinetsbeleid ten aanzien van Israël en worden uitgevoerd binnen de internationaal erkende grenzen van beide landen.
Eleven children killed in Gaza ‘were taking part in programme helping them with trauma’
Norwegian Refugee Council chief says group is ‘devastated’ to hear of deaths of young participants
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