Tag: Hamas

Israel in Gaza: War, Genocide, Both?

W.J. Astore

A War of Annihilation Is a Genocidal Act

History teaches that you can have genocide without war, you can have war without genocide, and you can have war and genocide together.  In Gaza today, the right-wing Israeli government is clearly engaged in a war on the Palestinian people that amounts to a genocide.

The horrific face of genocidal war

Of course, Israeli leaders claim they are engaged in a war against Hamas, and Hamas alone. Events, however, prove they are engaged in a genocidal war of annihilation.

A few harrowing data points: Israeli forces have already killed or wounded 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza.  Journalist Chris Hedges reports that Israel:

has damaged or destroyed all 12 of Gaza’s universities. Some 280 government schools and 65 UNRWA-run schools have also been destroyed or damaged, often resulting in dozens of fatalities. About 133 remaining schools are used to shelter those displaced by the assault. More than 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes amid continued Israeli ground and air offensive that has killed more than 25,000 [now more than 28,000] people, including 10,000 [now more than 12,000] children.

Clearly, Israeli leaders are using war as a means of genocide, an excuse for it, as well as a form of camouflage for it.  Don’t be deceived. War and genocide can and do coexist and feed off each other, as did the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.  As Israeli leaders readily admit to war while dissembling about genocide, at least they can be justly accused of war crimes while being held to international agreements governing the conduct of war, such as the Geneva Conventions.

Israel’s genocidal war, if left unchecked, will eliminate Gaza and its people. That is the stated intent of the Netanyahu government, which spouts the worst kind of eliminationist rhetoric, rhetoric that amounts to a “final solution to the Palestinian question.”

Any country that arms Israel in its genocidal war is complicit. Guess which country is clamoring to send another $14 billion in weaponry to Israel so it can pursue its war/genocide in Gaza?  Yes: The United States of America. 

In Gaza, both Hamas and Israel may act savagely and cruelly, but only one side truly has the means at its disposal to slaughter the other, and that side is Israel.  Meanwhile, the mainstream media reserves words like “slaughter” for Hamas, even as Israeli forces kill Palestinians on a massive scale.

Clearly, the current strategy of the Israeli government is to destroy Gaza, making it uninhabitable, forcing the Palestinians in Gaza to leave or die.

When Israel is done in Gaza, they will turn to the West Bank.  As Netanyahu said, Israel’s goal is to dominate Palestine “from the river to the sea.”  Palestinians “in the way” are being killed, or starved, or expelled, or (if lucky) reduced to subjects under intolerable conditions of apartheid.

The Israeli government is getting away with this because it has the legal, military, and propaganda cover of the U.S. and much of Europe as well.  The Biden administration complains about the worst excesses of Israel’s genocide while sending its leaders the weapons they need to continue the killing.  Members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi suggest that earnest Americans calling for a ceasefire in Gaza are the useful idiots of Vladimir Putin.

It seemingly never occurs to Biden and Pelosi that they are the useful idiots of Bibi Netanyahu.

Stop the war in Gaza.  Stop the genocide.

Postscript: The “Words About War” Team have posted ten suggestions for writing and talking more clearly, honestly, and accurately about Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Please go to https://www.wordsaboutwar.org/gaza.html.

Israel as a Conquering State

W.J. Astore

1973 to 2023, or Burning My Scrapbook

In 1973, I followed the Yom Kippur War as a ten-year-old. I kept a scrapbook of articles on the war and cheered for Israel to win. Back then, I thought of Israel as a beleaguered U.S. ally, fighting for its survival against superior numbers of hostiles armed and supported by America’s #1 enemy, the Soviet Union.

Things didn’t go well for Israel in the opening days of that war. Soviet-supplied SAMs shot down or damaged Israeli planes; Soviet-supplied anti-tank missiles inflicted a heavy toll on Israeli tanks that were rushed into battle without supporting infantry. Things looked bleak for the IDF. But a rush of U.S. replacement equipment to Israel helped to turn the tide as Israel’s enemies turned overly cautious, consolidating their gains rather than exploiting their initiative. The IDF was able to stabilize the fronts then counterattack, seizing territory until both superpowers intervened to broker a truce.

Fifty years later, Israel’s strategic situation is far different. In 2023 Israel is a regional superpower, no longer threatened by the militaries of countries like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Forces like Hamas and Hezbollah have the capability to launch terrorist attacks, as Hamas did on October 7th, yet these attacks, gruesome as they often are, don’t pose a threat to Israel’s very existence.

Which is why the response by both Israel’s government and the Biden administration to October 7th is so over-the-top and indefensible. The reduction of Hamas does not require the reduction of Gaza to rubble. Conquest of land won’t conquer atrocity-driven hatreds. Anti-semitism won’t be alleviated by thousands of bombs and missiles, tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians killed and wounded, and the displacement of well over one million Palestinians from their homes.

Looks like conquest to me

Israel’s war against Gaza today isn’t being driven by concerns of national defense. It’s being driven by a desire for conquest. Israel is no longer a plucky underdog, if it ever was. Israel is now a death-dealing overlord exacting a Biblical level of destruction and revenge against a hated people, as Bibi Netanyahu himself admitted, and proudly so.

Shocking to me has been the total compliance, and I mean total, of the Biden administration. Whatever Israel wants, it gets: missiles, artillery and tank shells, bullets, drones, even a couple of aircraft carrier battle groups to deter other countries in the region from striking Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza. Biden and Blinken go to Israel only to embrace Bibi, flying political top cover for him as he launches all his kill missions. 

True, we do hear from Biden and Blinken some concern that Israel may be ethnically cleansing too fast, too ruthlessly. Slow down a bit, Bibi. Don’t make it too obvious that you’re conquering Gaza while driving its people into the desert—or into their graves.

Fifty years ago, I rooted for Israel in what I perceived as its war of survival. Today, I refuse to accept the notion Israel is engaged in a righteous struggle against evil Hamas, which is how the war is being sold here in the USA. Israel, with its powerful military, supplied bounteously by the USA, is engaged in a war of conquest, a retrograde struggle where ethnic cleansing is clearly the goal. Never mind, we are told, all the innocent children who have already died and will continue to die as Israeli warplanes drop more bombs and fire more missiles as the tanks continue to roll firing all those tens of thousands of shells shipped from the USA so that the IDF can bounce the rubble in Gaza.

Israel may be mighty in war, but wars not make one great. In reducing Gaza to rubble, Israel has reduced itself to an imperious and immoral conquering force. In enabling that force, in feeding it the most deadly weaponry and supporting it unequivocally, the Biden administration has shown it can out-Kissinger Kissinger in the practice of amoral realpolitik while obsequiously licking the blood off Bibi’s boots.

If I still had my 1973 scrapbook today, I’d have to burn it.

15,000 Bombs Equivalent to Two Hiroshimas

W.J. Astore

The Israeli Annihilation of Gaza

After dropping 6000 bombs in six days, the Israeli Air Force has now reached the staggering sum of at least 15,000 bombs dropped on densely populated areas of Gaza. The bomb tonnage is already equivalent to two Hiroshimas, notes Joshua Frank at TomDispatch. As he puts it:

[W]ell over 25,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza by early November, the equivalent of two Hiroshima-style nukes (without the radiation). Under such circumstances, a nuclear-capable Israel that blatantly flouts international law could prove a clear and present danger, not only to defenseless Palestinians but to a world already in ever more danger and disarray.

Israel is the only power in the Middle East with nuclear weapons; it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the right-wing government of Netanyahu would choose to use one or more if cornered.

Netanyahu’s goal seems clear: make Gaza uninhabitable to Palestinians through a combination of massive bombing, blockades (water, food, medical supplies, and other essentials), and invasion and occupation. Palestinians are to be “pushed” into the Sinai Desert, with Gaza absorbed into Israel. All this is being justified in the name of neutralizing Hamas, a terrorist organization that has no ability to hurt Israel in a major way. (The brutal attacks of October 7th were a one-off made more brutal by Israeli helicopter gunships whose counterattacks killed friendlies as well as the Hamas attackers.)

In the name of destroying Hamas, Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza so it can be absorbed into Israel. Apparently, there are enormous gas reserves off Gaza, possibly worth $500 billion, which were to be shared between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. With the Palestinians either dead, severely wounded, or evicted from Gaza, Israel will likely claim total ownership over those gas fields. Israel may yet become a major gas supplier to Europe, replacing much of the gas lost when Putin blew up his own gas pipelines to Germany. (Just kidding: America did that, as President Biden promised he would.)

Meanwhile, Joe Biden penned an op-ed to the Washington Post equating Hamas with Putin as “pure, unadulterated evil.” Hamas is allegedly trying to wipe Israel off the map with its “ideology of destruction,” but of course Hamas has no military ability to do this, whereas Israel does indeed have the power to wipe Gaza off the map. So where does Biden see the future heading? Consider this passage:

There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.

As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution.

He may as well wish for puppies and unicorns for everyone. Israel doesn’t want a two-state solution with a thriving Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s goal, to repeat myself, is clear: Gaza absorbed into Israel, with Palestinians displaced in another Nakba, along with the West Bank slowly absorbed into Israel as illegal Jewish settlements are extended.

This is, essentially, what Thucydides meant when he said: the strong do what they will; the weak suffer what they must.

What Biden’s op-ed was really about was justifying his $105 billion package in giveaways, mainly for Ukraine and Israel, with more than half that money flowing to U.S. weapons makers, the merchants of death or, as Biden calls them, job creators. In short, Biden celebrates the creation of a few jobs in America in the name of killing tens of thousands of Russians and Palestinians with American-made weaponry paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

Biden calls that “democracy” in action, the work of the world’s “essential nation” in contrast to the “murderous nihilism” of Hamas.

“Murderous nihilism”? Well, as we used to say as kids, it takes one to know one.

Speaking of murderous nihilism …

When Collateral Damage Is the Strategy

W.J. Astore

Buildings destroyed, civilians killed, millions made refugees: mission accomplished

In Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, so-called collateral damage (a terrifying euphemism) isn’t a regrettable cost of destroying Hamas. It’s the very strategy and goal of Israel’s response.

Israel* has already killed five thousand Palestinian children, but that’s spun as the regrettable price of destroying Hamas. More than 11,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed already, and I’ve seen reports of 46 journalists and 190 doctors and nurses among the dead. Babies are dying in hospitals due to Israeli attacks on the same and disruptions in power and medical supplies.

International law doesn’t seem to matter. What matters to Israel is expelling the Palestinians; to paraphrase what Tacitus once said of the Romans, Israel is creating a wasteland of rubble in Gaza and calling it “peace.”

They create a wasteland of rubble and call it “peace”

Israel’s goal is simple: the creation of new facts on the ground. Gaza is being rendered uninhabitable for Palestinians even as Hamas is being hunted down and decimated.

Israel recognizes Hamas is both an idea and the people who represent that idea; far easier it is to kill people than the idea, but if you can’t kill the idea, at least kill Hamas members and push Palestinians out of Gaza, mainly by bombing, blockade, and further invasion.

The end game is a land grab. Israel wants to annex Gaza after it’s made Palestinian-free. Palestinians will be pushed into the Sinai Peninsula or elsewhere. Collateral damage doesn’t matter because it’s inseparable from the strategy. In some sense, it is the strategy.

Since the US government has defined no “red lines” for Israel while promising a $14 billion gift in deadly arms, I’m not surprised Israel’s government assumes it can do whatever it wants. After all, President Biden has pledged his total and unconditional support to the right-wing rulers of Israel.

6000 bombs in six days. That was the initial sign that Israel had far more ambitious goals in sight than neutralizing Hamas. Gaza may yet cease to exist, its territory absorbed into Israel, the Palestinians forced out into tent cities or worse. With unconditional US support, Israel may well prevail in this ethnic cleansing, but at immense cost not only to Palestinians but to Jews as well.

*I realize many brave Israelis have resisted and condemned the actions of their right-wing government. I wish to acknowledge their clarity of purpose and moral courage.

Israel is “Daddy” to the U.S. Congress

W.J. Astore

A revealing letter from my Congressman

I wrote a note to my representative in Congress, William Keating (D), who is the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. I expressed my opposition to massive Israeli bombing and massive U.S. aid that facilitates that bombing. Yesterday, I received a form letter in reply that reveals Israel remains the “Daddy” to the U.S. Congress.

How so? The letter from Mr. Keating is plainspoken and direct in its condemnation of Hamas. There is, however, absolutely no criticism of Israel. None. Hamas is pure evil, Israel is a blameless victim, and that’s all you need to know, according to the letter signed by Keating.

Some examples from the letter: Hamas is described as launching “brutal attacks” that bring “death and destruction” to Israelis and Palestinians. They use Palestinian civilians as “pawns” and “human shields.” They are “terrorists.” It’s their attacks that have “already taken the lives of too many civilians.”

The letter also expresses support for a Palestinian state (no other details), for humanitarian aid to Gaza, while mentioning that Israel, in protecting itself against terrorism, must try to protect innocent civilians in Gaza as well. But perhaps the key passage in the letter is this one:

Israel has the right to protect its citizens against terrorists who continue to attack the country after Hamas carried out the largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. A ceasefire would only benefit Hamas and allow the terrorist group to rebuild, strengthen, and fortify its positions. 

As Ranking Member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr. Keating closes his letter by urging Hamas “to stop these violent attacks, which have already taken the lives of too many civilians.”

Here’s what’s missing from the letter: Any condemnation or even admission of the “violent attacks” by Israel that have already claimed the lives of more than 10,000 Palestinian civilians, including more than 4000 children. (The likely death toll is far higher since many bodies remain trapped and smashed and flattened under rubble.) Mr. Keating is completely unable or unwilling to criticize Israel in any way. Israel is completely in the right, Hamas is totally responsible for all the killing, and that’s all you need to know.

I see articles that say massive bombing of Gaza isn’t “genocide.” As if it’s a good thing that Israel isn’t killing all the Palestinians in its orgy of bombing.

Again, Mr. Keating rejects any ceasefire as a boon to the terrorists (Hamas, of course; there’s no such thing as an Israeli terrorist). Without saying it explicitly, he tacitly supports Israel’s strategy to turn Gaza into rubble while expelling as many Palestinians as possible.

In sum, Mr. Keating, and indeed nearly all members of Congress, are 100% behind the right-wing Israeli government. To the question, “Who’s your daddy?” the clear answer for Keating and his fellow members of Congress is “Israel and Bibi Netanyahu.”

America, Land of Innocents

W.J. Astore

I’m sure glad atrocity never happened here

It’s depressingly true that no nations or peoples are immune from committing atrocities. History is filled with them. Atrocities, that is.

Did Hamas commit atrocities, most notably on 10/7? Yes. Has Israel committed atrocities in Gaza since those terror attacks? Yes.

Any sane human is outraged by atrocious behavior. What is particularly galling about Israel’s atrocities is that the U.S. government is enabling them while claiming Israel and the U.S. are the good guys—and that, however many innocents die due to U.S. and Israeli bombs, bullets, and missiles, it’s all the fault of Hamas.

Even serial killers sometimes know they are monsters. We fancy ourselves as innocents.

Why? Because America is a “good” country. Good thing we never promoted slavery and participated in massacres of Native Americans.  Or the mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II.  Or widespread misogyny. (Remember that women weren’t even allowed to vote in presidential elections until 1920.). Good thing we’ve always embraced Jews, never discriminating against them or turning desperate Jews away during the Holocaust.

Americans should know from our own history that “good” people can do horrific things because as a country we’ve done them ourselves.

Most Americans see Israel as an ally, a modern democracy akin to the U.S. That doesn’t mean Israel is immune from atrocious behavior; again, our own history shows that America is well capable of slaughtering millions in the name of “manifest destiny.” Back in the day, most Americans agreed we had our own “human animals,” our own savages, and that “the only good Indian is a dead one.” So, in the name of destiny, even of God, we killed the brave.

My dog-eared copy

The other day, as a distraction from current events, I started reading again from Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms. As a European living when slavery was very much alive in antebellum America, Schopenhauer had this to say about the “pitilessness” and “cruelty” in “slave-owning states of the North American Union”:

No one can read [accounts of slavery in antebellum America] without horror, and few will not be reduced to tears: for whatever the reader of it may have heard or imagined or dreamed of the unhappy condition of the slaves, indeed of human harshness and cruelty in general, will fade into insignificance when he reads how these devils in human form, these bigoted, church-going, Sabbath-keeping scoundrels, especially the Anglican parsons among them, treat their innocent black brothers whom force and injustice have delivered into their devilish clutches. This book [on slavery in the USA] rouses one’s human feelings to such a degree of indignation that one could preach a crusade for the subjugation and punishment of the slave-owning states of North America. They are a blot on mankind.

Schopenhauer was pulling no punches, and rightly so. Yet there are still those in America who make the argument that slavery wasn’t all bad, that some slaves learned useful skills. Though I don’t hear such apologists volunteering to be slaves themselves.

If a curriculum in Florida can still put a happy face on the deep iniquity of slavery, which the U.S. eliminated (at least by law) in 1865, are we at all surprised that many can put a happy face on whatever Israel is doing in Gaza?

Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? Been there, done that. But that’s OK: “they” were savages. “We” the chosen ones had no choice. Or did we?

Violence Never Settles Anything

W.J. Astore

Or does it?

The ongoing Israeli attacks against Gaza put me to mind of one of my favorite science fiction books as a teenager, Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers.” In that book, a military veteran and teacher of “history and moral philosophy” is discussing violence with high school students. One of them blithely says violence never solves anything, which draws this memorable response from her hard-nosed instructor:

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue—and thoroughly immoral—doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything,’ I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms.

In Heinlein’s book, humans were at war with an alien species and those who chose military service to fight against “the bugs” got the right to vote and participate as citizens in government.

In a fight to the death, Heinlein suggested, the only choice right-thinking humans had was violence and a commitment to the total destruction of the enemy. There was no other solution.

I remember this cover well (vintage 1970s)

How might this apply to Gaza? Members of Hamas are Heinlein’s enemy bugs; in fact, all of Gaza is apparently an alien land that must be ravaged as the bugs are either killed or driven off the land. Violence will settle the issue of who controls Gaza, and by extension the West Bank, once and for all, with the IDF serving as Israel’s “Starship Troopers.”

Don’t get me wrong. My memory flashback to Heinlein was painful. It was not in any way a vote in favor of massive violence by Israel to solve the Gaza “problem.” Rather, I think Heinlein’s insight captures the mindset of those in authority in Israel at this moment. Kill or drive off the “bugs.” Settle this. No ceasefires, no pauses, no compromises. Total victory through massive violence is the decisive option.

In this mindset they are enabled by the U.S. president and Congress, who boast loudly of having Israel’s back, come what may. Indeed, the president and Congress eagerly wish to provide Israel all the weapons it needs to kill or drive off the “bugs.”

Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” remains a controversial book for its depiction of a thoroughly militarized neo-fascist society, a vision captured in Paul Verhoeven’s movie version of the same name, a biting satire of militarism run amuck, though the satire is apparently lost on more than a few viewers.

To echo Heinlein, violence certainly did settle things for the dodo and for the passenger pigeon. They are no more. Yet it’s also true that those who live by the sword will often die by it. And if that sword proves to be a nuclear one, we as humans may yet be joining the dodo in extinction.

More Lethal “Aid” for Israel

W.J. Astore

Can’t the Israelis Pay for their Own Bullets, Bombs, and Missiles?

Apparently the top priority in the U.S. Congress is sending more “aid” to Israel, most of it lethal. It’s more important than health care for Americans, aid for the poor and disadvantaged, or even aid to U.S. schools and cities. Basically, it’s more important than anything.

Why is this? What elevates sending more bullets, bombs, and missiles to Israel above all other matters in the U.S. government? How does this make any sense?

Last time I checked, Israel is a modern country with healthy finances and is capable of buying this “aid” if it really needed to. Why is the U.S. taxpayer footing the bill for more munitions to kill innocent people in Gaza? I don’t want my money going to ethnic cleansing and more death; do you?

What U.S. “aid” to Israel produces: Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after a bombing that killed dozens

Most Americans, roughly two-thirds, support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Our voices are simply ignored by “our” government, which of course shows us that “our” government truly isn’t ours. The owners and donors, the oligarchs, have their own priorities, and they are not ours.

In a note to accompany an article with Medea Benjamin at Common Dreams, Nicolas Davies notes that:

The US media have failed to inform the public how isolated the US is in its support for the massacre taking place in Gaza. 120 countries voted for an immediate ceasefire in the UN General Assembly, while only 12 small countries voted with the US and Israel to oppose the resolution. US and Israeli leaders are not just out of touch with the rest of the world, but with their own people. Only 29% of Israelis wanted a full-scale invasion of Gaza, while 66% of Americans wanted a ceasefire – and that included 80% of Democrats.

Not only that, but new House Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to connect $14.3 billion in aid to Israel to an identical reduction in the budget of the IRS! He wants to cripple the ability of the IRS to go after tax cheats in America while giving a huge handout to America’s weapons makers in the cause of “defending” Israel.

You know the saying about death and taxes being the most certain things we face in life? Obviously in America selling death trumps collecting taxes.

Israel, America, and Going “Massive”

W.J. Astore

Using Terror Attacks as an Excuse to Kill Indiscriminately

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew exactly what to do: “go massive.” Al Qaeda’s “shock and awe” attacks were an opportunity for the Bush/Cheney administration not only to strike against “terror” but against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, possibly even Iran, even though those countries had no role in 9/11. Here’s how Rumsfeld put it:

“Hard to get good case [against Iraq]. Need to move swiftly. Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.”

Going “massive” had another benefit: it distracted Americans from the colossal failure of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld to keep America safe, to anticipate and prevent the Al Qaeda attacks. Americans rallied around the flag and asked few questions as Congress gave the president a blank check to wage a “global war on terror.”

Something similar is happening in Israel today. The Hamas terror attacks are giving Bibi Netanyahu and the hard right in Israel an opportunity to “go massive,” to “sweep it all up, things related and not.” This has the added virtue of distracting Israelis from the colossal failure of Netanyahu in anticipating and preventing the Hamas attacks. Like their American counterparts, Israelis are tending to rally around the flag as their government is given a blank check (supported by the USA) to wage a war on terror in Gaza.

Of course, a war on terror is a war of terror, which is what we’re witnessing in Gaza. Massive Israeli bombing. Deaths that will soon exceed ten thousand. Widespread hunger, thirst, and suffering. Massive displacement of Palestinians from their homes. All justified because Israel was attacked, and not just attacked but embarrassed, as America was embarrassed on 9/11.

Consider these satellite images from Gaza showing massive destruction from Israeli bombing.

Broadly speaking, the USA and Israel share a conceit of being God’s chosen people and also of having the world’s finest and best military forces. These conceits were challenged respectively by the success of the Al Qaeda and Hamas terror attacks. Embarrassment coupled with anger and revenge leads to going “massive,” irrespective of wisdom or legality (or morality). Going “massive” is also a great CYA exercise, as in covering your ass.

Now is the time, these failed leaders decide, to punish “evildoers,” innocent people be damned. What matters is violence, action, vengeance, settling scores, irrespective of human rights and the so-called rules-based international order. It’s time to kill.

If history doesn’t quite repeat itself, it surely does echo as Israel, much like the USA after 9/11, goes “massive” and kills innocents while claiming it’s all in the cause of self-defense and justice.

Israel, Gaza, and the Language of War

W.J. Astore

Pay Attention to What You Read

Here’s a typical quick summary of the dire situation in Gaza from CNN this AM:

The US is seeking to delay an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza amid calls to free more hostages held there by Hamas and allow aid into the besieged enclave. A senior Israeli official told CNN there will be “no ceasefire” in Gaza, but emphasized efforts are ongoing to free the more than 200 hostages in the region “as quickly as possible.” However, the official added, “humanitarian efforts cannot be allowed to impact the mission to dismantle Hamas.” More than 4,600 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7 and over 14,200 others wounded, the health ministry there said.

Conditions on the ground in Gaza continue to deteriorate as Israel repeatedly bombards the strip with airstrikes.

For “Israeli ground offensive,” substitute massive military assault.  Note the mention of hostages held by Hamas but no mention of hostages/prisoners held by Israel.  “Besieged enclave”–open-air prison or concentration camp under constant bombing would be more telling.  “Dismantle Hamas”: the IDF goal is the total destruction of Hamas, with the death of civilians being blamed on Hamas because “they” allegedly use human shields, i.e. the Israeli government and military is never to blame.

Note the passive voice: 4600 people “have been killed in Gaza” — well, who’s killed them?  Who’s wounded 14,200 others?  With weapons provided by which countries?

Conditions in Gaza continue to “deteriorate”: What does this mean, specifically?  Lack of food, water, power, people dying in hospitals due to lack of supplies, people screaming in agony due to lack of anaesthesia, etc. And why are they “deteriorating”? It’s not just due to airstrikes by Israel. The Israeli government’s decision to stop food, fuel, electricity, and water to Gaza is creating the conditions for death and illness on a massive scale.

Looks like bombs over Gaza today—what can you do? It’s just the weather (Caitlin Johnstone)

Caitlin Johnstone has a fine critique about how Israeli bombing is being reported by the Western press. In essence, it’s reported as if bombs are simply dropping from the sky on Gaza: massive bombing as a very bad hail storm that must be endured and over which humans have no control.

Pay very close attention to how this war is being reported, especially in the Western mainstream press. For we all know the saying that the first casualty of war is truth.

Update: I’m involved with an effort, “Words About War Matter,” and the group led by David Vine has posted guidance for language related to Israel, Hamas, and Gaza. The link is https://www.wordsaboutwar.org/gaza.html.