Tag: Gaza

There Is Only One Spaceship Earth

W.J. Astore

Freeing the World from the Deadly Shadow of Genocide and Ecocide

Also at TomDispatch.com

When I was in the U.S. military, I learned a saying (often wrongly attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato) that only the dead have seen the end of war. Its persistence through history to this very moment should indeed be sobering. What would it take for us humans to stop killing each other with such vigor and in such numbers?

Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us, whether the fantasy troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cited by President George W. Bush early in 2002 or a new one — China, Russia, and North Korea — in the Indo-Pacific today. Predictably given that sort of threat inflation, this country is now closing in on a trillion dollars a year in “defense spending,” or close to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending, in the name of having a military machine capable of defeating “evil” troikas (as well as combatting global terrorism). A significant part of that huge sum is reserved for producing a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be quite capable of destroying this planet with missiles and warheads to spare.

My country, to be blunt, has long been addicted to war, killing, violence, and massive preparations for more of the same. We need an intervention. We need to confront our addiction. Yet when it comes to war and preparations for future conflicts, our leaders aren’t even close to hitting rock bottom. They remain in remarkable denial and see no reason to change their ways.

To cite two recent examples: Just before Easter weekend this year, President Biden swore he was personally devastated by Palestinian suffering in Gaza. At the same time, his administration insisted that a United Nations Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza that it allowed to pass was “non-binding” and, perhaps to make that very point, reportedly shipped 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs off to Israel, assumedly to be used in — yes! — Gaza.

The Biden administration refuses to see the slightest contradiction in such a stance. Men like Joe Biden and his chief diplomat Antony Blinken confess to being disturbed, even shocked, by the devastation our bombs deliver. Who knew Israel would use them to kill or wound more than 100,000 Palestinians? Who knew that they’d reduce significant parts of Gaza to rubble? Who knew that a blank check of support for Israel would enable that country to — it’s hard not to use the phrase — offer a final solution to the Gaza question?

Not to be outdone by the Democrats, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan recently cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in seeking a “quick” end to the conflict in Gaza (before walking his comments back somewhat). For him, Israel remains America’s greatest ally, whatever its actions, even as he argues that Palestinians in Gaza merit no humanitarian aid from the United States whatsoever.

With that horrifying spectacle — and given the TV news and social media, it truly has been a spectacle! — of genocide in Gaza, America’s leaders have embraced the very worst of Machiavelli, preferring to be feared rather than loved, while putting power first and principle last. Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, recently deceased, rightly vilified for pursuing a Bismarckian Realpolitik, and deeply involved in the devastation of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, might even have blanched at the full-throttled support for war (and weapons sales) now being pursued by this country’s leaders. Dividing the world into armed camps based on fear seems basic to our foreign policy, a reality now echoed in domestic politics as well, as the Democratic blue team and the MAGA Republican red team attack each other as “fascistic” or worse. In this all-American world of ours, all is conflict, all is war.

When asked about such an addiction to war, your average government official will likely claim it’s not our fault. “Freedom isn’t free,” so the bumper sticker says, meaning in practice that this country stands prepared to kill others without mercy to ensure its “way of life,” which also in practice means unbridled consumption by an ever-shrinking portion of Americans and unapologetic profiteering by the richest and greediest of us. Call it the “moderate” bipartisan consensus within the Washington Beltway. Only an “extremist” would dare call for restraint, tolerance, diplomacy, and peace.

A Common Cause to Unify Humanity

Short of an attack on Earth by aliens, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. today making common cause with “enemies” like China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. What gives? Isn’t there a better way and, if so, how would we get there?

In fact, there is a common foe — or perhaps a common cause — that should unite us all as humans. That cause is Earth, the health of our planet and all the life forms on it. And that foe, to state the obvious (even if it regularly goes unsaid), is war, which is unhealthy in the extreme not just for us but for our planet, too.

War turns people into killers — of our fellow humans, of course, but also of all forms of life within our (often very large) blast radii. In addition, war is a mass distraction from what should truly matter to us: the sacredness of life and the continued viability of our planet and its ecology. Call it a cliché but there’s no way to deny it: there is indeed only one Spaceship Earth. As far as we know now, our planet is the sole body in the universe teeming with life. Of course, the universe is incomprehensibly vast and there could well be other forms of life out there, but we don’t know that, not with certainty anyway.

Imagine, in a dystopic future, America’s “best and brightest” (or the “best and brightest” of another country) acting in a nuclear fury, employing the very weaponry that continues to proliferate but hasn’t been used since the destruction of two Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, and so crippling Spaceship Earth. Imagine also that our planet is truly the universe’s one magnificent and magical spot of life. Wouldn’t it be hard then to imagine a worse crime, not just against humanity, but life itself cosmically? There would be no recompense, no forgiveness, no redemption — and possibly no recovery either.

Of course, I don’t know if God (or gods) exists. Though I was raised a Catholic, I find myself essentially an agnostic today. Yet I do believe in the sacredness of life in all its diversity. And as tenacious as life may be, given our constant pursuit of war, I fear the worst.

Earthrise from the Apollo 8 mission

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall when the astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed earthrise as their spaceship orbited the moon in 1968. The crew read from Genesis, though in truth it could have been from any creation story we humans have ever imagined to account for how we and our world came to be. Specific religions or creeds didn’t truly matter at that moment, nor should they now. What mattered was the sense of awe we felt as we first viewed the Earth from space in its full glory but also all its fragility.

For make no mistake, this planet is fragile. Its ecosystems can be destroyed. Not for nothing did the inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, turn to the Hindu scriptures to intone, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he saw the first atomic device explode and expand into a mushroom cloud during the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.

In the febrile postwar climate of anti-communism that would all too soon follow, America’s leaders would decide that atomic bombs weren’t faintly destructive enough. What they needed were thermonuclear bombs, 1,000 times more destructive, to fight World War III against the “big fat commie rat.” Now nine (9!) nations have nuclear weapons, with more undoubtedly hankering to join the club. So how long before mushroom clouds soar toward the stratosphere again? How long before we experience some version of planetary ecocide via a nuclear exchange and the nuclear winter that could follow it?

Genocide and Ecocide on a Planetary Scale

The genocide happening in Gaza today may foreshadow one possible future for this planet. The world’s lone superpower, its self-styled beacon of freedom, now dismisses U.N. Security Council resolutions to stop the killing as “non-binding.” Meanwhile, Israel, whose founding was a response to a Holocaust inflicted during World War II and whose people collectively said Never Again, is now killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of righteous vengeance for Hamas’s October 7th attack.

If the U.S. and Israel can spin mass murder in Palestine as not just defensible, but even positive (“defeating Hamas terrorists”), what hope do we have as a species? Is this the future we have to look forward to, an endless echoing of our murderous past?

I refuse to believe it. It truly should be possible to imagine and work toward something better. Yet, in all honesty, it’s hard to imagine new paths being blazed by such fossilized thinkers as Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was a telling catchphrase of the 1960s. Now, we’re being told as Americans that we’ll have to place our trust in one of two men almost at or exceeding 80 years of age. Entrusting and empowering political dinosaurs, however, represents an almost surefire path toward future extinction-level events.

Let me turn instead to a 25-year-old who did imagine a better future, even as he protested in the most extreme way imaginable the genocide in Gaza. This February, fellow airman Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He sacrificed his life in a most public way to challenge us to do something, anything, to stop genocide. America’s “leaders” answered him by ignoring his sacrifice and sending more bombs, thousands of them, to Israel.

Aaron Bushnell did, however, imagine a better world. As he explained last year in a private post:

“I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.

“What I’m trying to say is, it’s so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.

“It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.”

His all-too-public suicide was a fiery cry of despair, but also a plea for a better future, one free of mass murder.

Earlier this week, millions of people across America witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. It’s awe-inspiring, even a bit alarming, to see the sun disappear in the middle of the day. Those watching took comfort in knowing that it would reappear from behind the moon in a matter of seconds or minutes and so gloried in that fleeting moment of preternatural darkness.

But imagine if the moon and sun were somehow to become permanently stuck in place. Imagine that darkness was our future — our only future. Sadly enough, however, it’s not the moon but we humans who can potentially cast the Earth into lasting darkness. Via the nuclear winter that could result from a nuclear conflict on this planet, we could indeed cast a shadow between the sun and life itself, a power of destruction that, tragically, may far exceed our current level of wisdom.

We know from history that it’s far easier to destroy than to create, far easier to kill than to preserve. Yet when countries make genocide or ecocide (from nuclear winter) possible and defensible (as a sign of uncompromising “toughness” and perhaps the defense of “freedom”), you know that their leaders are, in some sense, morally obtuse monsters. And who or what are we if we choose to follow such monsters?

As human populations rise, as vital resources like water, food, and fuel shrink, as this planet grows ever hotter thanks to our intervention and our excesses, we’ll need to cooperate more than ever to ensure our mutual survival. Far too often, however, America’s strategic thinkers dismiss cooperation through diplomacy or otherwise as naïve, unreliable, and impractical. “Competition” through zero-sum games, war, or other hyperviolent urges seems so much more “reasonable,” so much more “human.”

To the victor goes the spoils, so it’s said. But a planet despoiled by thermonuclear war, cast into darkness, ravaged by radiation, disease, and death, would, of course, offer no victory to anyone. Unless we put our efforts into ending war, rather than continuing to war on one another, such conflicts will, sooner or later, undoubtedly put an end to us.

In reality, our worst enemy isn’t some “axis” or other combination of imagined foes from without, it’s within. We remain the world’s most dangerous species, the one capable of wiping out most or all of the rest, not to speak of ourselves, with our folly. So, as Aaron Bushnell wrote, free your mind. Collectively, there must be a better way for all creatures, great and small, on this fragile spaceship of ours.

The Morally Bankrupt Biden Administration

W.J. Astore

Plenty of more bombs for Israel, together with billions in warplanes

The Biden reelection campaign tells me to fear MAGA and Donald Trump. I fear the Biden administration and its moral bankruptcy.

It’s been a grim 48 hours in the Middle East, as summarized here by Caitlin Johnstone:

In the span of just a few hours we learned that Israel committed a horrific massacre at al-Shifa hospital, struck an Iranian consulate in Syria killing multiple Iranian military officers, and killed a vehicle full of international aid workers in an airstrike. This murderous regime is out of control.

Out of control, indeed. The Biden administration claims it’s frustrated with the Netanyahu government, so how does it show its frustration? By approving the sale of more F-35 jets to Israel, together with more bombs to turn what’s left of Gaza into rubble. Just what Israel needs: 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs. That’s 1.8 kilotons of bombs right there, added to a bomb tonnage against Gaza that has already reached Hiroshima and Nagasaki levels. But I guess it’s OK if you drop thousands of bombs rather than just two atomic bombs.

It’s OK: Israel used a lot of “Made in USA” bombs to do this, not just a couple of atomic bombs.

Meanwhile, I saw this morning that the Biden administration is pressing to sell up to 50 newly built F-15 jets to Israel, a sale that will require Congressional approval. Not to worry—that sale will be approved.

Way to punish Israel, Joe Biden!

Even Trump, who’s professed his love of Israel, is not as slavishly obedient to Netanyahu as Biden is.

And the Palestinians in Gaza? They simply don’t matter, else the Biden administration wouldn’t be providing all those bombs and warplanes to Israel.

We need regime change in Washington, D.C.

MAGA, however, isn’t the answer. We don’t need to make America great again. We need to make America moral, ethical, compassionate, and humane. MAMECH?

More Weapons for Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

W.J. Astore

Focus on Reality, Not Kayfabe

In my email this morning is this short synopsis from Reuters:

US will send more bombs and warplanes to Israel

  • Details: The new arms package is worth billions of dollars and contains more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, sources said. President Joe Biden on the same day said he was devastated by the suffering of the people Israel is bombing in the Gaza Strip and that “we must also pause to reflect on the pain being felt by so many in the Arab American community with the war in Gaza.”

All credit to Reuters for juxtaposing those two items. As President Biden claims he is “devastated” by the Palestinian people and their suffering in Gaza, he’s sending Israel more bombs to devastate Palestinians in Gaza.

If the U.S. government were truly against genocide, it would stop sending genocide-enabling weapons to Israel. If Biden were truly frustrated by Bibi Netanyahu, an arms embargo would be an effective way to show it. But the Biden-Netanyahu spat is kayfabe, a staged event that we’re supposed to pretend is true.

Let’s pretend this is real and unscripted

Kayfabe is a useful concept from the world of “professional” wrestling. Bibi is now being set up as the bad guy, with Biden as something like a good guy, trying to get Bibi to moderate his behavior.

Very few people are fooled by this nonsense. Much more importantly, people in Gaza are dying while this staged nonsense is shoved in our faces by the corporate-owned media.

U.S. State Department Official Resigns–Accuses U.S. Government of Enabling Genocide in Gaza

W.J. Astore

Annelle Sheline Stands For Honesty and True Public Service

I caught this story first on Twitter/X, then CNN, where Ms. Sheline’s resignation letter was posted. What follows is the text of her resignation letter to the Department of State. It is well worth reading in full.

Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.

Annelle Sheline

Annelle Sheline (Courtesy Annelle Sheline)

Yet Israel is still planning to invade Rafah, where the majority of people in Gaza have fled; UN officials have described the carnage that is expected to ensue as “beyond imagination.” In the West Bank, armed settlers and Israeli soldiers have killed Palestinians, including US citizens. These actions, which experts on genocide have testified meet the crime of genocide, are conducted with the diplomatic and military support of the US government.

For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.

Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began. Members of civil society have refused to respond to my efforts to contact them. Our office seeks to support journalists in the Middle East; yet when asked by NGOs if the US can help when Palestinian journalists are detained or killed in Gaza, I was disappointed that my government didn’t do more to protect them. Ninety Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been killed in the last five months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That is the most recorded in any single conflict since the CPJ started collecting data in 1992.

By resigning publicly, I am saddened by the knowledge that I likely foreclose a future at the State Department. I had not initially planned a public resignation. Because my time at State had been so short — I was hired on a two-year contract — I did not think I mattered enough to announce my resignation publicly. However, when I started to tell colleagues of my decision to resign, the response I heard repeatedly was, “Please speak for us.”

Across the federal government, employees like me have tried for months to influence policy, both internally and, when that failed, publicly. My colleagues and I watched in horror as this administration delivered thousands of precision-guided munitions, bombs, small arms and other lethal aid to Israel and authorized thousands more, even bypassing Congress to do so. We are appalled by the administration’s flagrant disregard for American laws that prohibit the US from providing assistance to foreign militaries that engage in gross human rights violations or that restrict the delivery of humanitarian aid.

The Biden administration’s own policy states, “The legitimacy of and public support for arms transfers among the populations of both the United States and recipient nations depends on the protection of civilians from harm, and the United States distinguishes itself from other potential sources of arms transfers by elevating the importance of protecting civilians.” Yet this noble statement of policy has been directly in contradiction with the actions of the president who promulgated it.

President Joe Biden himself indirectly admits that Israel is not protecting Palestinian civilians from harm. Under pressure from some congressional Democrats, the administration issued a new policy to ensure that foreign military transfers don’t violate relevant domestic and international laws.

Yet just recently, the State Department ascertained that Israel is in compliance with international law in the conduct of the war and in providing humanitarian assistance. To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.

Some have argued that the US lacks influence over Israel. Yet Retired Israeli Maj. Gen. Yitzhak Brick noted in November that Israel’s missiles, bombs and airplanes all come from the US. “The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting,” he said. “Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Even now, Israel is considering invading Lebanon, which brings a heightened risk of regional conflict that would be catastrophic. The US has sought to prevent this outcome but shows no appetite for withholding offensive weapons from Israel in order to compel greater restraint there or in Gaza. Biden’s support for Israel’s far-right government thus risks sparking a wider conflagration in the region, which could well put US troops in harm’s way.

So many of my colleagues feel betrayed. I write for myself but speak for many others, including Feds United for Peace, a group mobilizing for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza that represents federal workers in their personal capacities across the country, and across 30 federal agencies and departments. After four years of then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to cripple the department, State employees embraced Biden’s pledge to rebuild American diplomacy. For some, US support for Ukraine against Russia’s illegal occupation and bombardment seemed to reestablish America’s moral leadership. Yet the administration continues to enable Israel’s illegal occupation and destruction of Gaza.

I am haunted by the final social media post of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old US Air Force serviceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington on February 25: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

I can no longer continue what I was doing. I hope that my resignation can contribute to the many efforts to push the administration to withdraw support for Israel’s war, for the sake of the 2 million Palestinians whose lives are at risk and for the sake of America’s moral standing in the world.

The U.S. Government Is Complicit in Genocide

W.J. Astore

Israel Is the Tail Wagging the American Dog of War

The U.S. government is complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Americans may think that “aid” to Israel is held up in Congress, more than $14 billion in death-dealing munitions and machinery of war, but in fact the U.S. has already provided massive amounts of bombs and targeting guidance to Israel, all with the tacit approval of Congress, and of course with the full-throated support of the Biden administration.

Israel is the tail wagging the American dog of war.

Guess who’s being invited to address (or, should I say, command) Congress again?

The best summary of this reality that I’ve seen came in a recent TomDispatch article written by Stan and Priti Gulati Cox. Here’s an extended excerpt:

Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing [Israeli] killing spree [in Gaza] by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, “That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support.”

In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label: “Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported, two-thirds of Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to 2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%!)

In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden administration sent 230 cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove that included 100 BLU-109 bombs (2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before exploding), 5,400 MK84 and 5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39 bombs, 3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”

Such powerful bombs, reported Al Jazeera, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes, such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so, we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective punishment being supported by our tax dollars.

Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in the IDF’s operations. According to the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report, even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding that “for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza.”

And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put it this way when it came to President Biden’s warning not to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and destroying Hamas.”

The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this, but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did successfully last fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth.” The Israelis are mostly bombing civilian sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their way through the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured themselves, along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in past Israeli attacks.

I sure wish the Biden administration and Congress could do something to stop the genocide in Gaza. Don’t you? But I guess they can’t control their own tails. Put differently, perhaps they simply can’t disobey their master’s commands.

Speaking of which, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is currently competing with Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to see which one of them can roll over and beg more quickly and obsequiously to their master, Bibi Netanyahu. Yes, Bibi is being invited once again to wag the Congressional dog and issue his commands to a slavishly obedient pack of Washington politicians.

There’s nothing like a foreign leader coming to Congress to bark out commands to make me proud to be an American.

Israeli Government Starves Palestinians in Gaza

W.J. Astore

Genocide through Famine

If you’re like me, you subscribe to news services like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters, which send daily news reports and quick highlights. Given the busy pace of life, most people probably read those headlines and short summaries and little else. The mainstream media is counting on that.

Consider this quick summary I received today from Reuters’ “Daily Briefing”:

ISRAEL AND HAMAS AT WAR

  • More than five months into Israel’s ground and air campaign, launched in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, there are widespread shortages of food, medicines and clean water in Gaza, doctors and aid agencies say. Starving children fill hospital wards as famine looms.

Note the framing here. It’s a war between Israel and Hamas, with history beginning on October 7, 2023. Most of all, note how widening famine is described: it’s just happening, apparently due to a war that Hamas started.

You’re not told that the famine is man-made. That the Israeli government is blocking thousands of trucks loaded with food, medicine, and clean water for Gaza. Instead, you’re encouraged to think it’s much like a natural disaster, if not entirely the fault of Hamas, which allegedly started all the trouble on October 7th.

Sorry, kid: the Israeli government won’t let the aid trucks roll. Blame Hamas!

If challenged to write my own summary for Reuters, I’d pen something like this:

Israeli government policies are producing mass famine in Gaza. Israel has already killed or wounded more than 100,000 Palestinians since the October 7th Hamas attacks. An Israeli blockade on most aid to Gaza promises death tolls in the hundreds of thousands over the next few months. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to send weapons to Israel while providing diplomatic cover in the UN, making it complicit in genocide.

We see similar narrative elision with the Russia-Ukraine War, which in the mainstream media is all the fault of Vladimir Putin, who woke up in February 2022 and decided to invade Ukraine because he’s a power-hungry maniac, a new Hitler—or worse. Meanwhile, Putin blew up his own highly profitable Nordstream pipelines, or maybe a rogue element from Ukraine did it. Who can tell, right?

Dishonest and disingenuous reporting is facilitating genocide in Gaza and a horrendous war in Ukraine that is hollowing out that country. In each case, what we’re supposed to focus on is something else: the crimes of Hamas and the alleged megalomania of Putin.

Gaza is especially egregious since a genocide is in progress there, enabled and empowered by massive weapons shipments from the United States to Israel. But I guess there’s nothing we can do to help those starving Palestinian children “as famine looms.” I guess we can construct a temporary pier that will take two or three months to build; I hope the starving children can hold on that long. Whether that pier will facilitate relief efforts or serve mainly as a Trojan horse to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza (ethnic cleansing by the boat load) remains to be seen.

Stop All U.S. Aid to Israel

W.J. Astore

Israel, a Rich Country, Can Pay Its Way

I have a modest proposal: Stop all U.S. aid to Israel. Why does Israel need billions and billions in aid, mainly so they can buy U.S. weaponry? If they need it, they can pay for it. And if they’re going to use U.S. weapons to kill massive numbers of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, America shouldn’t sell them the weapons no matter what Israel is willing to pay.

Am I anti-Israel? Anti-semitic? Only if IDF General (and war hero) Matti Peled was.

Here’s what Israeli general Matti Peled had to say about U.S. aid to Israel:

“Until 1974, Israel had not received foreign aid money and we did fine. Receiving free money, money you have not earned and for which you do not have to work, is plain and simply corrupting.” His son, Miko Peled, then added that his father consistently argued “that the weapons the U.S. sold [or gave] to Israel were corrupting the country and were being used to maintain the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.”

Miko Peled wrote that his dad consistently said “It is bad for Israel, it is morally wrong, and it is illegal” (cited on page 68). Again, was General Matti Peled, IDF war hero, anti-Semitic? A self-hating Jew? Of course not. He was a moral, principled, courageous person who fought against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. His son Miko continues that fight.

Miko Peled recounted his dad’s position in “The General’s Son: Journey of An Israeli in Palestine,” published in 2012 by Just World Books. I first learned of the Peled family’s activism against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people in an interview between Miko Peled and Chris Hedges in January of this year. I highly recommend both that interview and Miko Peled’s book.

The Chris Hedges Report

The Chris Hedges Report with Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general who served in the Special Forces in the Israeli army, on the racist indoctrination and militarization of Israeli society.

The Israeli army, known as the Israel Defense Forces or IDF, is integral to understanding Israeli society. Nearly all Israelis do three years of military service. Most men continue to serve in the reserves until middle age. Its generals often retire to occupy senior positions in government an industry. The dominance of the military in Israeli society he…

Listen now

“Utilize Weapons in a Responsible Way”

W.J. Astore

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin Gives Israel a Blank Check to Kill

I was watching Congressman Ro Khanna question Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on 2/29 about Israel’s demolition of Gaza when Austin uttered a humdinger about trusting Israel to “utilize weapons that we provide them in a responsible way.” He said that after noting that Israel has already killed more than 25,000 women and children in Gaza.

What “responsible” looks like

U.S. weapons shipments and transfers to Israel are couched as “security assistance,” and these weapons are often paid for by the American taxpayer, or put on the national credit card for future generations to pay. When Americans get antsy about being complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the Biden administration, supported by many Republicans, remind them that allegedly these weapons for Israel create jobs in the USA.

“Genocide creates jobs” is not exactly a healthy slogan.

Of course, Lloyd Austin alone isn’t the problem here. The entire Biden administration supinely supports Israel and Bibi Netanyahu. Donald Trump, Biden’s most likely opponent this fall, is even more slavishly pro-Israel. 

And so the nightmare in Gaza continues as Israel utilizes its “Made in USA” bombs and missiles “in a responsible way.”  Responsible in this case meaning the killing and injuring of more than 100,000 Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza’s ability to sustain human life for the remaining two million Palestinians there.

Disgust

W.J. Astore

Disgust is the word today that captures my feelings about the actions of “my” government. Disgust at facilitating and defending the Israeli genocide in Gaza, as casualties among Palestinians soar above 100,000. Disgust that Congress only clamors for more billions for Israel ($14 billion in the Biden administrations’s bill; $17 billion in the alternate bill from the House Speaker) to enable more killing. Disgust at the strenuous efforts being exerted to get $61 billion in more weapons and aid to Ukraine while denying any oversight over or insight into how that money is spent. Disgust at the government seeking more billions to arm Taiwan, possibly stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble with China. Disgust at constant fear-mongering about Russia hacking the 2024 presidential election, as if that “threat,” such as it is, can’t be countered and contained. Disgust.

My parents must have loved me …

To think that as a boy I stuck American flag stickers all over the house, including on the entry door and the washing machine, which must have just thrilled my parents, though I can’t recall them punishing me for it. To think that I saluted the flag innumerable times while standing at attention in uniform while serving in the military for twenty years.

Here’s the thing. I’m not disgusted at America. I’m not disgusted with Americans. I meet people every day who are kind, helpful, and generous, from the nurse who took my blood pressure this morning to the postman who delivered my mail and waved to me this afternoon since I happened to be outside when he came. Americans, generally speaking, are decent people. But there’s something seriously wrong with the U.S. government and its owners and donors, who are basically unaccountable to the rest of us.

Disgust is my prevailing emotion. So I write about it, I speak about it. I could do more, much more, but I suppose I am too risk-averse, too reluctant to act in a disobedient way to prevailing authority. So, in a way, I am part of the problem as well.

I am perplexed at how my fellow Americans can keep voting for men like Biden and Trump. Or any of the “usual suspects” who occupy Congress. Nothing will change for the better if we keep electing the same corrupt no-accounts. Why do we persist in such folly?

I suppose Senor Airman Aaron Bushnell couldn’t take it anymore. He was so disgusted, so demoralized, so damaged, by what he was witnessing in Gaza that he burnt himself alive in front of the Israeli embassy, crying out against genocide and for a free Palestine. When not ignoring his sacrifice, the mainstream media has been busy dismissing him as a radical anarchist raised within a religious cult. He was no “radical.” His “cult” was a devoted Christian community.

Aaron Bushnell, a brave and principled young man, sacrificed himself to draw attention to an ongoing crime against humanity. And so I feel more disgust when I see how his sacrifice is being twisted, when it’s addressed at all, by media sites in America.

Disgust. It’s not enough, I know. But I think when we open our eyes and truly seek hard truths, and truly see them for what they are, maybe then we can begin to move the needle in a better direction.

As a reader here says, hope is not a plan. But hope can sustain us as we come together to make a plan. A plan for a better America, one that isn’t constantly fear-mongering and warmongering, whether here or abroad.

A new America that might make me proud to slap a sticker of the flag on my door, as I did with such innocence a half-century ago on a door now long gone …

Airman Sets Himself on Fire to Protest Genocide in Gaza

W.J. Astore

Mainstream Media Outlets Say No One Was Harmed in the Israeli Embassy while Denying the Reality of Genocide 

A young Air Force airman set himself on fire outside the Israeli Embassy in DC to protest genocide in Gaza. Aaron Bushnell, 25, died after being taken to a hospital.

Aaron Bushnell before he set himself on fire. Mainstream media sites chose not to feature any images of Bushnell, focusing instead on the Israeli Embassy or “the crime scene”

This was an extreme and deadly act of political protest directed against the Israeli government’s killing and wounding of 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza and its ongoing war of annihilation there, a war abetted by the U.S. government’s political and military power. Bushnell shouted “Free Palestine!” as he burned.

Bizarrely, an officer at the scene pointed a gun at him as he burned before another first responder asked for fire extinguishers. How a man on fire posed a threat to others is unclear.

[Update 2/26, 1730 EST: CNN provides a decent summary of Bushnell’s intent; follow this link:  https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1762212568398278893]

[Update 2/27, 0820 EST: Disgracefully, this was the headline of a story at the Washington Post on Bushnell: Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past.  At this link. It appears Bushnell grew up in a Christian society in Orleans on Cape Cod, that he joined the Air Force in 2020, served as a cyber defense ops specialist in Texas, and was interested in U.S. history, socialism, and anarchism.  The Washington Post article is at pains to portray him as being raised by a weird, possibly abusive, Christian cult while putting a heavy stress on his interest in anarchism. He also liked cats and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, so you just know he was a misfit. In all seriousness, Bushnell seems to me to have been an unusually principled and sensitive man who acted out of strong moral conviction.]

Aaron Bushnell, an unusually principled, determined, and thoughtful young man

Coverage in the mainstream media is revealing. I checked three sites: NBC, CBS, and the Guardian in Britain. Let’s look at NBC first.  NBC said that Bushnell’s act was an “apparent protest” against the “Israeli-Hamas war.” NBC later added that Israel’s “crackdown” in Gaza was termed a genocide by Bushnell. NBC itself stuck to the narrative that Israel is engaged in a defensive war, a “crackdown,” against Hamas.

Next, let’s look at CBS.  CBS repeated the narrative of “an apparent protest of Israel’s actions in its war against Hamas.” CBS did mention that Bushnell’s stated motivation was that he could no longer be complicit in an ongoing genocide in Gaza, followed by a lengthy denial by Netanyahu and the Israeli government. Claims of genocide are “false” and “outrageous,” as CBS gave Netanyahu the last word. 

Turning to the British Guardian, its first sentence is more blunt: An active-duty member of the US air force has died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC, while declaring he will “no longer be complicit in genocide”.

It also included a key statement Bushnell apparently included on his Facebook page: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Nevertheless, the Guardian downplayed the 100,000 killed and wounded in Gaza as numbers generated by the “Hamas-run health service” there.

The final site I’d like to consider is Antiwar.com, an example of alternative media, I suppose. This site gets it right, in my view, so I’m posting the article here in its entirety:

US Airman Sets Himself on Fire in Front of Israeli Embassy to Protest Gaza Genocide

The airman said he would ‘no longer be complicit in genocide’

by Dave DeCamp February 25, 2024 at 9:04 pm ET Categories NewsTags Gaza, Israel

Updated on 2/26/24 at 7:44 am EST

An active duty US airman set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC to protest the US-backed slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

According to Talia Jane, an independent journalist who obtained the video of the incident, the airman, who was identified as Aaron Bushnell, 25, died of his wounds late Sunday night.

According to Axios, a video of the incident shows the airman saying he would “no longer be complicit in genocide” and that he was about to “engage in an extreme act of protest.”

“But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal,” Bushnell said right before lighting himself on fire.

While on fire, he repeatedly shouted, “Free Palestine.” He burned for about one minute before law enforcement officers extinguished the flames. According to Jane, one officer initially drew his gun on the airman as he burned.

Washington DC’s Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department said in a post on X that the airman was transported to a hospital with “critical life-threatening injuries.” The department also said the officers who extinguished the fire were members of the US Secret Service.

The dramatic protest comes as the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza by the Israeli campaign is approaching 30,000, and over 69,000 have been wounded. About two-thirds of the casualties are women and children.

The International Court of Justice has ruled that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide and decided to take up the case brought to the court by South Africa. Despite the massive civilian casualty rate and international pressure, the US continues to provide unconditional support for the slaughter.