If you have to kill 274 people to free four others being held hostage, is that a “successful” military operation? According to the Israeli and U.S. governments, it is.
Israel, apparently with some U.S. help, attacked the Nuseirat Camp in Gaza and freed four hostages seized by Hamas. In doing so, however, Israeli forces killed and wounded hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children.
It’s a brutal calculus that sees Palestinians as being “in the way” and essentially worthless and therefore expendable. Put differently, Israel sees all Palestinians in Gaza as “guilty,” as “terrorists,” therefore there are no innocent Palestinians and Israel can kill as many as they need to, without guilt or remorse, to achieve a desired end.
Coverage by the mainstream media in the West generally has been glowing, praising Israel for rescuing four hostages while downplaying the Palestinian dead as collateral damage that’s hardly worth noticing.
Here’s an example from the BBC:
You see a happy young woman freed by Israeli forces, but you don’t see any images of the more than 200 Palestinians killed by Israel in this “special military operation.” And note how the Palestinian dead are consigned to a sub-heading and a smaller font, using the passive voice (“were killed”), as if it’s unclear who killed them and why.
Yes, it’s good to see four hostages freed. But if hundreds of other innocent people must die or suffer grievous wounds in the process, that’s not a “successful” operation. It’s a massacre.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Testimony before the International Court of Justice
Israeli military action is killing roughly 50 mothers a day in Gaza; 120 children a day; one journalist a day. Gaza is at the brink of mass famine. The Israeli strategy is clear: render Gaza uninhabitable. Force the Palestinians to flee. Create a desert and call it “peace.”
The following testimony before the International Court of Justice makes it abundantly clear that Israel is engaged in a campaign of incremental genocide, a genocide in slow motion, supported without equivocation by the United States. More than supported: U.S. weaponry facilitates the destruction of Gaza.
The destruction of Gaza, the mass murder of Palestinians, makes a mockery of the so-called rules-based order that the Biden administration allegedly upholds.
Another “emergency” shipment of arms to Israel: What a way to end the year! First, the Biden administration sent $106 million in tank shells to Israel without Congressional approval. Now, the government is sending $147.5 million in fuses, charges, etc. to Israel for 155mm artillery shells, also without Congressional approval. Mind you, Hamas doesn’t have tanks or heavy artillery, so these shipments aren’t for “defense.” Tank and artillery shells are really for one thing: urban destruction. Artillery is the very definition of an area weapon, i.e. imprecise. Yet, even as the Biden administration sends this weaponry to Israel, which will enable more killing on a mass scale, it expresses concern that Israel is ethnically cleansing too fast, killing too many innocent civilians too quickly.
Along with bombs, this is what tanks and artillery shells are good for
You can’t have it both ways, obviously. You can’t send heavy calibre weaponry to Israel and then complain when they use it. And to justify this aid as an “emergency” for America’s national defense interests! If democratic processes can be bypassed simply by declaring an emergency that clearly doesn’t exist, there is no democracy. Thanks for making that obvious, Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Gaza continues to be pounded into rubble. Casualties there will soon exceed 100,000 as nearly half a million Palestinians begin to starve. The Israeli/US end game is clear: render Gaza uninhabitable, forcing the Palestinians to make a choice: leave or die.
The two self-declared democracies of Israel and the USA are combining to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians with the goal of incorporating its territory into Israel. Now I know why the world hates us: for our freedoms, right?
How can Israel commit such a crime? I suggest you watch the interview below with Gideon Levy, who explains it plainly and succinctly. As he notes:
Israeli Jews generally believe they are God’s Chosen People.
Israeli Jews generally believe they are the real victims here (the Holocaust; Hamas attacks).
Palestinians have been dehumanized as barbarians, as worse than animals.
The Chosen People, the eternal victims, are tired of the beasts in Gaza and are getting rid of them, one way or another.
“We [Israelis] live in denial,” Levy says. Ignorance is combined with nationalism. Most Israelis simply don’t want to know what their government is doing in their name. To that end, media coverage in Israel is entirely one sided; the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is almost never shown. The only people who suffer are Jews.
To Israelis, life is precious and dear; but Israel acts to show Palestinians their lives are cheap. Gaza, Levy says, was a “cage” for the Palestinians living there; Israel has now decided to empty that cage.
Levy has no illusions about the nature of the Israeli government under Bibi Netanyahu, which he calls a brutal dictatorship. And, if we accept him at his word, for he is an Israeli Jew who knows his country, America is aiding a brutal dictatorship in its goal of clearing the Gaza ghetto irrespective of the cost in lives of innocents.
What does that make the Biden administration? What does that make us?
Note: the video link below contains a warning about graphic material. It’s apparently designed to discourage viewing. There is nothing “graphic” about this video except the truths that Levy speaks.
Two nights ago, I watched the classic film version of H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.” Made in 1953, the film depicts a Martian invasion of the Earth, with humans being massacred in droves due to the superior technology of the Martian fighting machines. As the narrator intoned, channeling the book by Wells, it was the “massacre of humanity.” Spoiler alert: humanity is saved by viruses and bacteria that infect and kill the Martians.
As I watched the Martian fighting ships with their heat rays obliterate human cities, turning them into so much rubble, I was reminded of the scenes of destruction I’ve seen from Gaza. Essentially, the Israeli military, with its superior technology, most of it provided by the United States, are those Martians. The Palestinian people in Gaza are the outgunned humans facing annihilation.
There is a “War of the Worlds” in Gaza, and the Martians are winning. Whether diseases spread by the elimination of hospitals in Gaza by Israel, the cutting off of safe drinking water, the destruction of sewerage systems, and just general destruction of infrastructure will ultimately doom the Israeli war of conquest is unlikely. This time, the Martians just might win, at least in the short term.
Here in the USA, I continue to read articles that suggest Israel is justified in its massacres, though increasingly you see some hedging that perhaps the massive killing and bombing is a bit too indiscriminate. Good luck telling the Martians that.
The Martians in their war on Earth were quite plain about what they were about: the conquest of Earth and the elimination or subjugation of humanity. The Israeli government has been quite plain about what this war is about for them: the conquest of Gaza and the elimination or subjugation of the Palestinians there. It’s an old-fashioned war of conquest that is readily recognizable. One “world” has decided that another “world” must cease to exist.
We are witnessing the obliteration of Gaza. The death toll has already surpassed 16,000 as Israel continues to pummel targets with American-made bombs and missiles. Even CNN is worried (from my email update this AM):
Top UN officials are warning of an “apocalyptic” situation in Gaza with “no place safe to go” for civilians as the deepening humanitarian crisis sparks international concern. Israel is expanding ground operations to the entire territory to “eliminate” Hamas and has told Palestinians to flee large swaths of southern Gaza, where many had previously sought refuge. But the war-torn region is in the midst of a near-total internet blackout as the last major telecommunications operator said services are completely cut off. This means many Palestinians are unable to communicate with one another or call for help while evacuating, and emergency workers can’t coordinate their responses.
Caitlin Johnstone has a telling article in which she states an important truth: Israel couldn’t be doing this without generous U.S. support. Israel is dropping the bombs, firing the missiles, and shooting the artillery rounds and bullets, but the U.S. is largely serving as the merchant of death for all this, though “merchant” is the wrong word. The U.S. is giving all this deadly weaponry to Israel as “aid,” even as there’s much rhetorical gnashing of teeth in Washington about Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing and wanton killing of Palestinian innocents, including thousands of children. I say “rhetorical” because as Johnstone notes, the U.S. government could curtail Israeli military action by turning off the spigot of arms flowing from U.S. arsenals and warehouses to Israel.
But that’s not going to happen. AIPAC has a hammerlock on Congress; those few members of Congress who’ve called for a ceasefire in Gaza are already being targeted by the powerful pro-Israel lobby, with AIPAC promising to spend upwards of $100 million to unseat those politicians who aren’t consumed by bloodlust against Gaza. The power of AIPAC is reinforced here by the MICC, the military-industrial-congressional complex that Ike warned us about in 1961, which stands to profit immensely from more war in the Middle East as well as Ukraine. The combination of AIPAC with the MICC is akin to Mechagodzilla, an almost unstoppable monster of immense power.
They create a desert and call it “peace”: Gaza turned to rubble
Godzilla in its various incarnations would be hard-pressed to duplicate the scenes of devastation we’re seeing in Gaza. Israel is practicing its own version of the infamous statement from America’s war against Vietnam: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
The Israeli version: We had to destroy Gaza to save it from Hamas.
It made no sense in Vietnam, and it makes no sense today in Gaza. But this is not about making sense: it’s about power and vengeance and profit.
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.
Bracing Views 