I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
Aid group accuses Tel Aviv of deliberate ethnic cleansing in latest damning report
Israeli soldiers move on armored personnel carriers (APC) near the Israeli-Gaza border, in southern Israel, December 18, 2024
THE medical aid group Doctors Without Borders accused Israel of
“ethnic cleansing” in Gaza in a damning new report released on Thursday.
This comes as the Swedish government announced that it was ending its
“core support” for the United Nations relief agency for Palestinians
(Unrwa).
MSF, the acronym from Doctors Without Borders’ original French name,
said Israel was systematically attacking Gaza’s healthcare system and
restricting essential humanitarian assistance.
MSF say Palestinians are forcibly displaced, trapped and bombed. It
also says MSF staff have witnessed a relentless campaign by the Israeli
forces marked by massive destruction, devastation and dehumanisation.
The report accuses Israeli forces of having prevented essential items
such as food, water, and medical supplies from entering the strip on
numerous occasions, as well as blocking, denying, and delaying
humanitarian assistance.
Fewer than half of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially functional, and the healthcare system lies in ruins.
The report says that during the one-year period covered by the report
— from October 2023 to October 2024 — MSF staff “have endured 41
attacks and violent incidents, including air strikes, shelling, and
violent incursions in health facilities; direct fire on our shelters and
convoys; and arbitrary detention of colleagues by Israeli forces.”
MSF medical personnel and patients have been forced to evacuate
hospitals and health facilities on 17 separate occasions, often
literally running for their lives.
The report says that even if the war ends today, the loss of
families, repeated forced displacement and inhumane living conditions
will scar the population for generations.
MSF’s secretary-general Christopher Lockyear said Israel was guilty
of dismantling the infrastructure in Gaza that was essential for life
and had strangled access to humanitarian aid in the besieged enclave.
He said: “We are seeing forced displacements, ethnic cleansing in the
north, the destruction of infrastructure, physical and mental injuries
to the population in Gaza and all of this is undeniable.”
The report said: “Attacks on civilians, the dismantling of the
healthcare system, the deprivation of food, water and supplies are a
form of collective punishment inflicted by the Israeli authorities on
the people of Gaza.
“This must stop now.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry hit back at the report, describing it as “entirely false and misleading.”
In a statement the ministry said Israel does not target innocent
health workers and tries to ensure delivery of aid, and charged the
medical group with failing to acknowledge Hamas’s alleged use of
hospitals as bases “for terrorist activities and operations.”
The MSF report reinforces similar allegations made on Thursday in a Human Rights Watch study.
HRW accused Israel of a campaign in Gaza that amounted to “acts of
genocide,” cutting off the flow of water and electricity, destroying
infrastructure and preventing the distribution of critical supplies.
HRW executive director Tirana Hasan described the findings of the MSF
report as being consistent with her own organisation’s report.
Amnesty International secretary-general Agnes Callamard said the
research by MSF was “yet one more report detailing the carnage in Gaza.”
But Vedant Patel, a spokesman for the US State Department, said it “disagreed with the HRW report conclusions of genocide.”
Of the MSF report Mr Patel said the health organisation itself
acknowledged that the “intentionality” of any Israeli actions was beyond
the scope of its assessment.
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn warned the British government to learn lessons from the report.
He said: “This devastating account of Palestinian suffering should be
mandatory reading for government ministers. How much more evidence of
genocide does the government need to end its complicity and suspend all
arms sales to Israel?”
Director of the Tricontinental Centre for Social Research Vijay
Prashad told the Morning Star: “Perhaps the most stunning part of the
new MSF report is this simple fact: it could take up to 15 years to
clear the rubble and 80 years to rebuild housing.
“This itself shows that Israel has ethnically cleansed Gaza for at least several generations. No further proof is necessary.”
Luciano Zaccara, an associate professor in Gulf politics at Qatar
University, says Israelis are trying to push all the people in the north
of Gaza out of the area, which has been under siege.
He told the Al Jazeera network that the Israeli operation and siege
“has been going on for more than two months without anybody being able
to do anything.”
Mr Zaccara said: “There is no doubt about the kind of ethnic
cleansing that they are carrying out in the north of Gaza,” he stressed.
MSF said it continued to demand an immediate and sustained ceasefire
and safe access to northern Gaza, to allow the delivery of humanitarian
aid and medical supplies to hospitals.
The aid organisation added that while it continues “to provide
lifesaving care in central and southern Gaza, we call on Israel to end
its siege on the territory and open vital land borders, including the
Rafah crossing, to enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian and medical
aid.”
The Israeli onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza continues.
On Thursday five children and 12 others were killed in an Israeli air
strike on the Shaaban Rais School sheltering displaced people and
earlier another five people were slaughtered in the Maghazi refugee camp
in Deir al-Balah.
Officials said some people remained under rubble and on roads where ambulance and civil defence crews could not reach them.
The Gaza health ministry said the total number of deaths in Gaza is
now at least 45,206 since October 7, when Hamas staged a cross-border
raid that killed 1,139 Israelis.
Meanwhile the Swedish government confirmed it was ending its “core support” for Unrwa.
In October, Israel’s parliament approved legislation banning Unrwa
activities in the Palestinian territories, a measure that was to take
effect in 90 days.
Stockholm said that 800 million kronor (around £58 million) being
allocated for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the region next year
will instead go through the channels of the Swedish International
Development Co-operation Agency and the government’s support for other
agencies such as the World Food Programme, the UN Children’s Fund, the
UN Population Fund and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Sweden’s minister for international development co-operation and
foreign trade, Benjamin Dousa, posted on X that the Israeli decision
will make much of Unrwa work difficult or impossible.
But head of Unrwa Philippe Lazzarini said on X: “Defunding Unrwa now
will undermine decades of Sweden’s investment in human development
including by denying access to education for hundreds of thousands of
girls and boys across the region.”
He added the decision would “double” the suffering for the people of Gaza.
Desperate to stay relevant, the faithful US-Israeli
‘handpicked leader’ has intensified his crackdown on Palestinians in the
West Bank and pledged to work with Trump
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the
United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City
on 26 September 2024 (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP)
Palestinian Authority
(PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to stay relevant as events
in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region have been moving at a much
faster pace than the octogenarian politician is able to cope with.
This week, amid an Israeli genocide that has been unceasingly raging in Gaza for 14 months, Abbas’s security forces brazenly killed several prominent resistance fighters in Jenin in an attempt to appease the Israelis and their American benefactors.
When then-US President Donald Trump announced in January 2020 the so-called “deal of the century“, a proposal that was wholly aligned with Israel on all issues of contention, Abbas said:
“I want to say to the duo – Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin]
Netanyahu – that Jerusalem is not for sale, and all of our rights are
not for sale or bargaining. Your deal, the conspiracy, will not
happen…we say a thousand times no, no, no to the deal of the century.”
Yet, when Trump was re-elected on 5 November, Abbas called
to congratulate him and vowed to work with him on a political
settlement that he himself rejected out of hand five years earlier.
This was followed by a deal the
Egyptians struck two weeks ago between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian
faction headed by Abbas. The agreement was to appoint an independent
committee of prominent and professional Palestinians in Gaza to run its
affairs and reconstruction after the war.
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It was a demand by the Zionist regime and the Biden administration in
order to dislodge Hamas from any future role in ruling Gaza.
However, Abbas’s Fatah quickly retracted
its approval as the Israelis rejected any role for or input from Hamas
in the future of Gaza. It seems that such a deal would not play well in
Netanyahu’s vow for a “total victory” over Hamas and the resistance.
So what’s Abbas’s end game, and where is he headed in his twilight years?
Hand-picked ‘leader’
In his 20th year of a four-year term, Abbas announced in late November, a few days after he turned 89, his succession plan.
He issued a decree that called for the appointment of the unambitious, uncharismatic and feeble Fatah leader, Rawhi Fattouh, as an interim president after Abbas.
Condoleezza Rice recounted how a handful of people in 2003 hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people
The 75-year-old Fattouh is currently serving as the chairman of the
Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
parliament in exile.
In 28 years, the PNC met only once in 2018.
Interestingly enough, Fattouh is also the same person who served as
an interim president after the death of former PA President Yasser
Arafat in November 2004 until Abbas was elected to replace him in
January 2005.
For over a year, Abbas has been under American pressure to appoint a successor who will be as compliant and amenable to Israel and the US as he has been during his long tenure.
As recalled in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor,
Condoleezza Rice, who served as US President George W Bush’s national
security advisor, recounted how a handful of people in 2003, including
her, Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli
prime minister at the time, hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of
the Palestinian people.
For much of 2002, Sharon refused to deal with Arafat but was eventually able to convince Bush to sideline the PLO leader in favour of Abbas as the more submissive and yielding Fatah leader.
Before he was appointed as a prime minister in 2003 as a result of American and European pressures, Abbas was publicly ridiculed
by Arafat, who called him the “Karzai of Palestine”, a reference to
Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was widely considered in
the Arab world as a US puppet.
Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, had risen to the leadership of Fatah and the PLO almost by default.
Even though he was considered among the first generation of Fatah
founders as he joined the movement in the early 1960s, he was not
distinguished or appointed to senior positions until decades later.
‘Strategic asset’
It was not until most of the early founders and senior leaders of
Fatah and the PLO, such as Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf
(Abu Iyad), Sa’ad Sayel, Abu Yusuf al-Najjar, and many others, had been
assassinated by Israel between the 1970s and early 1990s that Abu Mazen
started to hold more significant positions within Fatah and the PLO.
When the PLO adopted its 10-point plan in 1974, paving the way
towards a political settlement based on recognising Israel in exchange
for a truncated Palestinian state, Abbas was known to favour abandoning
any form of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.
Why the Palestinian Authority’s biggest claim is a lie
Regarding this political ideology, Abu Iyad, who was considered to be
next in line in the Palestinian movement after Arafat before his
assassination in 1991 by the Zionist regime, quipped: “The thing that I fear the most is that treason would one day just become (normalised as) an opinion.”
When
Israel failed to crush the First Intifada (1987-1991), it adopted a
political track that would preserve its expansionist and settlement
policies. This path culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Abbas
was not only one of the few Palestinian interlocutors in this process
but also the person who actually signed the accords on the White House
lawn on behalf of the Palestinians.
Needless to say, the Oslo process was nothing short of a disaster that was doomed to fail from the start.
The Palestinian negotiators led by Arafat and Abbas surrendered their
main card and strongest leverage at the outset, which was the
recognition of the Zionist regime on 78 percent of the historical land
of Palestine.
In exchange, Israel only pledged to engage in a vain political
process that should have ended with an independent Palestinian state by
1999, or so thought the PLO leaders.
Yet, more than three decades after Oslo, the Zionist regime has not only killed the so-called two-state solution but consolidated its plans for a “Greater Israel”, including a more than six-fold increase of illegal settlers in the West Bank from about 115,000 in 1993 to over 750,000 today.
According to a 2015 International Crisis Group report, most Israeli officials consider Abbas their most important “strategic asset”.
The reason is quite clear.
It has been mainly through a political philosophy championed by Abbas that rejected decades of Palestinian resistance, prompting one expert to remark: “Abbas not once in his life did he adopt armed resistance, nor did he support it.”
He often mocked any notion of armed resistance by any group, including his own, even when Israel had killed scores of Palestinians unprovoked.
Brutal security force
His leadership style turned a relatively vibrant Palestinian national
movement into a subsidiary of the Israeli occupation, often referred to
as a “five-star occupation”
since it had relieved the Zionist regime from appearing as the
occupying power, while carrying out aggressive and domineering
settler-colonial policies worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime.
During his tenure, he embraced the American dictate to change the
security doctrine of the Palestinian security forces from policing and
protecting Palestinian population centres into a brutal security force
acting as the first line of defence of Israeli settlements and the
occupation army against any form of resistance, including passive
popular forms.
Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail
Since his rise to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he adopted the American plan under Lieutenant General Keith Dayton to train PA security forces, which engaged in suppression and silencing of dissent, as well as illegal arrests and torture, many times leading to death as in the case of Nizar Banat in 2021.
In
coordination with the US and the Zionist regime, Abbas created a
bloated security force whose primary mission was security coordination
with the Israeli army to thwart any resistance or operations against the
occupation.
He called this mission sacred and for decades refused to stop it even though Palestinian public opinion overwhelmingly condemns it.
Scores of Palestinian political bodies and factions have called on him to halt such disgraceful practices.
A detailed 2017 report
found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all
civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget, and
receives around 30 percent of total international aid given to the
Palestinians, including most of the funds coming from the US.
The
study further found that the Palestinian security sector spent more of
the PA’s budget than the education, health, and agriculture sectors
combined. It included more than 80,000 individuals, where the ratio of
security personnel to the population is as high as 1 to 48 – one of the
highest in the world.
In Abbas’s first encounter with Donald Trump in 2017, the US president bragged
about the PA’s continued security coordination with Israel, as he
praised its effectiveness in protecting the Israeli occupation, in which
he said: “They get along unbelievably well. I was actually very
impressed and somewhat surprised at how well they got along. They work
together beautifully.”
‘Small-time dictator’
When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, Abbas coordinated with
the Americans and Israelis, as laid out in detail in Rice’s account in
her book, to obstruct the Hamas-led government from being able to serve
as the democratically elected party.
In fact, it was Abbas’s security forces, again in coordination with the Americans, that tried in 2007 to topple
Hamas’s government in Gaza, only to be outmanoeuvred by Hamas, which
took over Gaza, effectively resulting in two separate Palestinian
governments.
Palestinian resistance can always survive without outside support. Can Israel?
David Wurmser, a Bush administration official at the time, commented
in a Vanity Fair article in 2008 that the Bush administration was
engaged “in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship
[led by Abbas] with victory”.
He added that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.
Wurmser
further observed: “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a
coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before
it could happen.”
Ever since this internal strife, Gaza has been living under a crippling Israeli siege with little interference from Abbas.
With
the support of the Americans, Israelis and regional actors, Abbas took
total control of the Palestinian political life. He started to
unilaterally issue decrees like any small-time dictator of a banana
republic.
His unconstitutional and unlawful decrees would dismiss governments, install prime ministers, cancel elections, spend billions, cover corruption by his cronies, family members and sons, and appoint a constitutional court in order to dismiss the Hamas-led legislative council.
But perhaps the behaviour that shocked most Palestinians was Abbas’s
deafening silence during the early days of Israel’s genocidal war.
As the Israeli war of extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign
intensified, Abbas would voice his strong but empty opposition to the
Israeli brutality on the one hand, while continuing to have security
coordination with the same vigour as if no genocide in Gaza, daily
settler attacks across the West Bank, or routine Al-Aqsa compound
incursions had been taking place for over a year.
With the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza entering its 15th month with
no end in sight, and while Israel prepares its long-term occupation of
Gaza, as well as aggressively pushing its policy of effective annexation
of Area C in the West Bank, it appears that the current fascist Israeli
government is on the verge of dumping Abbas in favour of a new security
arrangement that would favour local Palestinian collaborators to govern the Palestinian populations.
A 2017 study found that the Palestinian security sector employed
around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA
budget
It’s clear that the current Zionist regime, with its grand design to
impose the Greater Israel project, wants to resolve its demographic
Palestinian problem and decisively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
in its favour once and for all.
Hence, part of Israel’s grand strategy to realise this objective is not merely to be content with banning Unrwa, killing the two-state solution, or establishing Israeli hegemony in the region.
But in essence, it’s moving aggressively to redesign all the
Palestinian institutions and sources of power that have defined the
Palestinian struggle over decades.
Regardless of Abbas’s decree or what happens to him in the near term
as he enters the twilight of his life, Israel will make sure that he is
the last Palestinian leader who combines all the titles that define the
Palestinian institutions – the PA president, the PLO chairman, the Fatah
leader, and the president of the “State of Palestine”.
From an Israeli perspective, he has served his purpose, and it is now time for the final solution.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global
Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine,
he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured
academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating
to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be
contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.
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On
Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he spoke
with President-elect Donald Trump about Israel’s need to achieve
“victory” against Iran and its allies in the region.
“I
unequivocally declare to Hezbollah and to Iran: In order to prevent you
from attacking us, we will continue to take action against you as
necessary, in every arena and at all times,” Netanyahu said.
“I
discussed all of this last night with my friend, US President-elect
Donald Trump. We had a very friendly, warm and important discussion. We
discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory and we spoke at length
about the efforts we are making to free our hostages,” the prime
minister added.
The conversation
between Netanyahu and Trump came after reports said Israel sees an
opportunity to bomb Iran following the regime change in Syria that
ousted former President Bashar al-Assad. The Wall Street Journal also
reported that the Trump transition team is discussing the idea of
strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The
pretext for any Israeli or US action against Iranian nuclear facilities
would be to stop Iran from building a bomb, but there’s no evidence
that Tehran has decided to pursue nuclear weapons, something recently
acknowledged by the CIA.
In his
remarks on Sunday, Netanyahu also said Israel was changing the “face” of
the Middle East. “Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same
Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is
not the same Iran; it has also felt the might of our arm.
The
Israeli leader claimed Israel has “no interest in a conflict with
Syria,” but Israel has unleashed a heavy air campaign against the
country since the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
launching over 800 strikes.
The recent fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in
Damascus marked a turning point in Syria’s ongoing conflict, with new
reports revealing a covert Ukrainian role in aiding Syrian rebels.
Ukrainian intelligence provided strategic support, including drone
technology and experienced operators, to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the
dominant rebel faction in Idlib, Caliber.Az reports via The Washington Post.
This effort underscores Ukraine’s broader strategy to undermine
Russian influence on multiple fronts amid its ongoing war with Moscow.
Approximately four to five weeks prior to the HTS-led offensive,
Ukrainian operatives delivered 150 first-person-view drones and deployed
20 experienced operators to assist the rebels. Although Western
intelligence sources suggest this aid played a modest role in the
regime’s downfall, it was a significant demonstration of Kyiv’s intent
to counter Russia in unconventional theatres such as the Middle East,
Africa, and even within Russia itself.
Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the GUR, has reportedly collaborated
with opposition groups in Syria under a special unit known as “Khimik,”
bolstering rebel capabilities against Russian-backed Syrian forces.
Ukraine’s motivations for such actions are clear. With its homeland
under siege, Kyiv is actively opening secondary fronts to stretch
Russian resources and influence. A June report in the Kyiv Post detailed
strikes by Ukrainian-backed Syrian rebels on Russian military
installations, accompanied by video evidence of these operations.
Russian officials have expressed growing concern, with statements
from representatives such as Alexander Lavrentyev and Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov accusing Ukrainian intelligence of conducting “dirty
operations” in Idlib. Despite these claims, independent verification
remains scarce.
While Russia has downplayed Ukraine’s involvement, pointing to HTS’s
independent drone program and prior expertise, the rapid collapse of
Assad’s regime caught Moscow off guard. Russian Telegram channels have
sought to minimize Kyiv’s role, suggesting Ukrainian personnel were in
Syria for too short a time to significantly influence operations.
However, this narrative contrasts with Ukraine’s broader pattern of
covert actions against Russian forces worldwide.
Beyond Syria, Ukraine has demonstrated its capability for overseas
operations in other regions. In July 2023, Ukrainian intelligence
reportedly supported Malian rebels in an ambush against Wagner Group
mercenaries, resulting in significant losses for the Russian
paramilitary group.
Such actions highlight the GUR’s aggressive strategy, with its head,
Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, affirming Ukraine’s commitment to targeting
Russian military assets globally. This approach has drawn concerns from
Western allies, including the Biden administration, over potential
escalations.
Ukraine’s actions in Syria align with its broader strategy to disrupt
Russia’s influence and partnerships. By aiding HTS, Kyiv weakened a
critical Russian ally in the Middle East, further isolating Moscow.
Although the Ukrainian assistance may not have been decisive, it
contributed to an environment where the Assad regime’s fall became
inevitable.
The parallels to other intelligence failures, such as Russia’s
inability to anticipate HTS’s offensive or Israel’s surprise during
Hamas’s October 2023 attack, are striking. Both underscore the
challenges nations face in responding to unconventional threats.
For Ukraine, these operations serve as a testament to its resilience
and resourcefulness in a protracted struggle against a powerful
adversary. While not the decisive factor in Damascus, Ukraine’s covert
actions signal its intent to shape the global battlefield to its
advantage.
Editor's remarks: There are great jubilations in Syria and the Syrian diaspora in the
world on the fall of Bashar al-Assad and his oppressive regime. However,
many people are not aware of the implications of the new ‘Mujahideen’
regime in Damascus and its unknown course in the time to come. What role
did the United States and Israel play in bringing down the al-Assad
regime and its long-term implications for Syria and the Middle East?
There are many questions that need clarifications and answers. In this
article, Kyle Anzalone, a political analyst, discusses the imperial role
of the United States in Syria, a role about which many ordinary readers
don’t hear much in the mainstream media.
by Michael Brenner, Dissident Voice, December 2nd, 2024
Racism is at the core of Western societies complicity in Israeli’s
genocide against the Arab Palestinians. That is self-evident. The United
States and Britain are more than accomplices; they are co-belligerents.
The behavior of all has been constant over 14 months of graphic
depiction day-by-day of atrocities of the most heinous kinds.
Racism, though, is a multifaceted phenomenon. It encompasses a wide
range of attitudes and actions. They should be parsed as a precondition
for analyzing which have been operative in this case, how they shaped
policies and interventions, how reconciled with the values of liberal
democracies, and how sustained in the face of such glaring criminal
abuses of humanity.
Nazi extermination of Jews is at one extreme of racism. The negative
weighing of ethnic identity in vetting candidates for a position of town
supervisor also is racism. Using disparaging terms about a particular
ascriptive group in casual conversation is racism. Apartheid is racism –
whether in the form of ghettoes, Bantustans, or the Gaza concentration
camps. Thoughts can be racist, words can be racist, actions can be
racist. There are connections among these three expressions of racism –
but to varying degrees and not always.
Let us take a look at these ambiguities and discontinuities with a
view to getting a better fix on the ways that racism has driven Western
countries’ involvement in the Palestine genocide.
It is normal for social groupings to differentiate themselves. This
is an affirmation of solidarity. It need not be accompanied by an
ascription of the other’s intrinsic inferiority. Nor be hostile and
aggressive.)
The diversity among larger, more organized societies changes things
in two respects: variations in race, color, language, ethnicity are
frequently encountered; the capacity for stereotyping grows along with
interactions that can lead to contention and rivalry.
Competition and conflict generate a need for justification of
‘winners’ exploiting/subordinating/abusing losers. Prejudice serves this
person.
That experience once institutionalized, as it was historically in
Western societies’ domination of non-Western peoples, leaves an enduring
residue of prejudicial feelings among both parties in the relationship.
Those feelings can fade over time while remaining dormant with the latent potential to resurface.
A dramatic event instigated by a formerly subordinate/inferior that
inflicts pain is the surest catalyst for that recrudescence – for it is
acutely humiliating as well as painful. The intensity of the reaction
(emotional, physical) to such an offense can be commensurate with the
sublimated guilt one feels about past abuse of the perpetrator.
Back to the contemporary situation. The facilitating, background
factors that help explain Western elites’ willing embrace of the
Palestinian genocide are easy to identify. The long history of colonial
domination of ‘inferior’ peoples; their systematic exploitation; a
widespread sense of diminishing status relative to emerging new centers
of strength and influence – as punctuated by the 1973 oil crisis and
ensuing dependency on the ‘hajjis’; a reflexive disposition to perform
penance for historical sins committed against Jews in Europe by turning a
blind eye to the sins of the previously sinned against; 75 years of
painting the Arabs as the ‘black hats’ in their struggle against the
Israeli settler state; revulsion at earlier acts of terror abroad by PLO
and PFLP.
Stunning events over the past two decades have stirred a potent mix
of negative emotions about Arabs. 9/11 punctuated the opening of the
Terrorism Era. Reciprocation of violent acts on Western soil and the
brutal, indiscriminate retaliation of the so-called War on Terror drew a
line of blood not only between the Westerners on the one side, and
terrorist groups along with their perceived state ‘sponsors’, on the
other. It also imprinted powerful images of Arabs/Muslims as fanatics,
as a menace to their comfortable social order, as people ‘beyond the
pale’ – to coin a phrase – who can be dealt with only through strength
and a readiness to follow the admonition of “an eye for an eye.”
This depiction of the ingredients that have formed the psyche of our
political class in regard to Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular,
goes aways toward explaining the West’s current abhorrent behavior. The
extremity of their actions and inactions could be seen as the outcome of
a dynamic wherein enmity turns into hatred (albeit expressed in the
quiet tones of normality) and dehumanization of the ‘other.’ A
paradoxical feature of this dynamic is that as past shameful abuses of
the ‘other’ are aggravated by new ones, there is a compulsion to
continue farther down that path. For doing provides a perverse form of
reassurance that somehow they must have deserved such extreme ill
treatment. This relentless punishment of our victims becomes a
displacement of suppressed self-hatred – among a few.
Suppose that the analysis offered above makes sense. That still
leaves us with an inadequate understanding of what is happening. We
should bear in mind the unprecedented features of the present situation.
One, Western governments have no strategic interest in supporting
Jerusalem’s project of creating a Greater Israel by eliminating the
Palestinians. No security or economic stakes encourage that. On the
contrary, Western interests in the region, and in the wider world,
manifestly have been seriously damaged by their close association with
all parts of the Israeli campaign. Two, there is no uncertainly about
the gross crimes against humanity being committed before our eyes daily
or the genocidal intent of the Israeli government. Indeed, cabinet
ministers advertise what their plans are. Three, the means to prevent
the bloody onslaught existed at the outset, and have been available
throughout. Without abundant provision of arms and money from the United
States and allies, Israel could not have prosecuted its diabolical
strategy. Sanctions are also an available option, although unnecessary.
Four, Western societies – particularly the European – are timorous,
complacent and risk averse; therefore, to act in a manner that erodes
their legitimizing foundations is incongruous, and needs explanation.
Conclusion: the behavior of Western societies is
pathological – that is to say, abnormal. It is perverse. We all share
the natural instinct to protect the young of the species, and – to a
somewhat lesser extent – the vulnerable aged and infirmed. This
instinct, in fact, can be observed in the behavior of all mammals. Our
supposedly enlightened societies go well beyond instinct to proclaim our
dedication to those humane values, and to stipulate them in laws and
conventions. This instinct/principle normally overrides prejudice when
confronted, in the mortified flesh, with the realities of atrocity. Yet,
we are acting in the diametrically opposite manner. And we ruthlessly
repress those among us who point out that contradiction because their
witness to our perfidy is intolerable.
Therein lies a great puzzle. No conventional political or
sociological analysis can solve it. Filling that void is the compelling
challenge – and precondition for restoring a collective ethical sense
that abhors rather than embraces evil. There is no scarcity of
anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychologists. With luck, a few
talented and motivated persons among them might step forward.
Michael Brenner is Professor Emeritus of
International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of
the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS/Johns Hopkins. He was the
Director of the International Relations & Global Studies Program at
the University of Texas. Brenner is the author of numerous books, and
over 80 articles and published papers. His most recent works are: Democracy Promotion and Islam; Fear and Dread In The Middle East; Toward A More Independent Europe ; Narcissistic Public Personalities & Our Times. Read other articles by Michael.
This article was posted on Monday, December 2nd, 2024 at 8:50am and is filed under Genocide, Palestine, Racism.
On Tuesday, a Hamas official responded to President-elect Donald
Trump’s warning that there would be “all hell to pay” if Israeli
hostages in Gaza weren’t released by his inauguration on January 20,
2025.
Trump didn’t mention Hamas by name in his warning but appeared to
threaten US strikes on the Palestinian group, saying, “Those responsible
will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied
History of the United States of America.”
Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, said Trump’s
threat should be directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
citing his efforts to sabotage a hostage and ceasefire deal. Israeli
officials and media reports have also blamed Netanyahu for the lack of a
deal.
“Hamas understands that Trump’s message is, in fact, directed
primarily at Netanyahu and his government,” Naim said, according to The
Palestine Chronicle.
Naim said the Netanyahu government had been using negotiations as a
cover to advance its own agenda. “Netanyahu’s government must put an end
to this deceptive charade,” he said.
Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who was recently fired by
Netanyahu, said that the prime minister sabotaged the chances of a
hostage deal by demanding Israel maintain control of the Philadelphi
Corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.
“I can tell you what there was not, security considerations. The IDF
chief and I said there was no security reason for remaining in the
Philadelphi Corridor,” Gallant told hostage families on November 7.
“Netanyahu said that it was a diplomatic consideration, I’m telling you
there was no diplomatic consideration.”
There are believed to be 97 Israeli hostages remaining in Gaza, and
Israeli media reported back in September that Netanyahu told a Knesset
committee that only half of the hostages were believed to be alive.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October that the Israeli
government was done with ceasefire talks and was instead focused on
annexing portions of the Gaza Strip. There’s been some recent efforts by
mediators to restart talks, but there’s no sign the effort is going
anywhere, and there’s no end in sight to the daily slaughter in Gaza.
Moshe Yaalon, a former member of the ruling Likud party, was defense
minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 2013 to 2016
during the 2014 Gaza War. In comments on Saturday, Yaalon criticized the
current Netanyahu government.
“The path they’re dragging us down is to occupy, annex, and ethnically cleanse — look at the northern strip,” Yaalon said.
When asked to clarify if he meant Israel is currently conducting
ethnic cleansing or is headed in that direction, Yaalon pointed to what
is happening on the ground in northern Gaza today.
“There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. They’re now operating
in Jabalia. They’re basically cleaning the territory of Arabs,” he
said.
The northern cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia have been
under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing
campaign that’s following an outline known as the “general’s plan.” In
those areas, Israeli troops are demolishing homes, so Palestinian civilians have nowhere to return.
Yaalon’s comments sparked a strong backlash in Israel, but he doubled
down on Sunday. In another interview, the former defense minister said
the term ethnic cleansing was “accurate” and asked “no other word for
it.”
He pointed to Israeli ministers who openly call for the expulsion of
Palestinians from Gaza and the establishment of Jewish settlements.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said
that it may be possible to cut the population of Gaza in half within
two years through “voluntary emigration,” though there is nothing
voluntary about the displacement in Gaza that’s happening today.
This is the keynote talk I gave on Nov. 1 at the conference, The End
of Empire, at University of California Santa Barbara. The conference was
organized by Professor Butch Ware, who is also the Green Party’s
vice-presidential candidate. University administrators banned all
publicity about the talk on university social media accounts.
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Transcript
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of
history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing
to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will
achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will
turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed
and over 1.2 Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it
into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the
West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing
the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly
salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali
Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear
installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk, Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan — are true believers
in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented
vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s
occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and
Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This
time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for
Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use
their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and
turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate
violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a
generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was
done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the
former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one
generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in
1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
But this is a lesson that is nevr learned.
How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as
liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing
sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst
for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in
2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia,
Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military
assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has
bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the
media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot
of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of
millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has
been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it
uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of
apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively
for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country
towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian
— are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and
government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in
primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel istalking about
months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted
respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the
courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation –
which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash
heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the
ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger
generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new
generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its
popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s
Christianized fascists
who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of
the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and
celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are
synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later
the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic,
journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a
stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish
extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This
mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire
citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the
future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When
mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation
of state power collapses.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence
against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli
military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This
wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged
by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military
dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern
Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But in the long term, it is suicidal.
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South.
Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya
Sinwar. It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, one of the founders
of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad, and who
founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat, who I also knew. But the daily
humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison
terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders.
There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar’s
place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point
over and over and over.
Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestiniansin Gaza, run for your
lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran
from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from
Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from
Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39
bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you
with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you
with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We
will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns,
your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification
plants. We will rain death from the sky.
Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few
belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We
don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you
are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And
when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn
around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and
forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy
with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never
return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions
in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter
jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We
kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the
thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We
poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created
this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not
exist for us.
But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We
revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive.
You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for
domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One
shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up
and blindfolded in the background. We loot.
Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities.
We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion,
our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing
yours.
Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game
played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter,
when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The
“disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is
happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they
were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers
and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in
the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked
that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The
singer Kobi Peretz asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The
audience erupted in applause and laughter.
We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the
United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated
the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in
Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the
Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.
We cannot plead ignorance.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian
aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians
will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be
rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing.
Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there
will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights,
claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The
real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away
from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor
and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and
aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless.
Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.
This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and
liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as
well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention
those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a
lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used
to justify the unjustifiable.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans,
are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by
our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others
with our advanced weaponry.
The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afgnaistan, replicating what
they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped,
wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians,
including children.
“After the war,” Nick Turse writes, “most scholars wrote off the
accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese
revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so
much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such
sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai
came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities.
Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober
studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from
the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government
archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real
American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once
they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of
genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling.
The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict,
fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of
all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given
that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five
million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as
well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the
corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the
Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S.
and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign
in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders,
functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of
it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated
the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class,
opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic
Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were
dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as
it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the
forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at
political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are
interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The
three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the
“Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal
mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our
killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel,
fetishize the military.
Industrail slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson
calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon.
Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its
intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an
effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cyniucally, calls
“mowing the lawn.”
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance
groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and
saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it
has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has damaged or destroyed
Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of
other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held
150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes,
missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize
Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched
earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has
dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear
bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It
drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster”
bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the
so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in
these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over
1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to
find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and
courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living
next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in
an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250
Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source
told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as
internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the
ground continue to bekilled. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.
Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.”
Israel has killed
at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and
9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling
injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted.
It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four
percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three
UNRWA workers have been killed in
Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These
numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those
dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer
function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are
counted, is well over 40,000.
At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.
“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and
human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than
140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated
wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such
as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”
In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA,
a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli
territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly
ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.
Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16
percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment
blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million
people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering
12.6 percentof a territory now reconfigured in preparation for
annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has
built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting
the aim of a permanent presence.”
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with
severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney
disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a
hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care.
Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.
Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of
civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools –
protected status. Palestinians are all branded
as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields
for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel
because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Rappatour for the
Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the
killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose
all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
“In August,” Albanes writes in her most recent report, “entry permits
for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been
restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per
cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been
destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food
insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”
“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering
Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted,
impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from
malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”
These measures, sh noters, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”
The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S.
which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S.
has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12
months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82
500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is
the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is
coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel
had to end up. And Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel,
infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the
globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial
weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as
migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields
decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires
proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to
battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be
an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those
Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next
Palestinians.
The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank
Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus,
Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it
difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets
ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets,
electricity and public health infrastructure.
Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks,
checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel
has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which
nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has
revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.
“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7
percent,nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs
have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the
previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed
and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children
who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the
torso.”
Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the
assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas”
or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are
“camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”
Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance
fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a
‘Greater Israel.’”
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting
Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian
disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other
countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their
attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan,
although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated,
including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail
Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way
for Israel’s genocide
of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons
shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough
Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any
presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are
familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has
rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough
of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The
Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful.
Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a
project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the
shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid
state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel
and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder.
We have no choice.
Genocide,
the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue.
It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter
schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication
of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a
species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It
eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim
to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of
our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo
Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes
very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference
and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes,
“but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous
are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act
without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps
alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,”
to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to
suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It
tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against
an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense
of responsibility.”
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing
of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families
and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude
tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields
by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to
enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of
Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we
want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will
triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything,
including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university
encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in
the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These
people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s
conscience.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the
thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the
wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace,
their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of
their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future,
their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of
professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity,
that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of
course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us
have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us
know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because
we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at
all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard
of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine
and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that
good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute
be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no
peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no
makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the
making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least
as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether
resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our
tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if
the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied
in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is
censorious. We are called to defy — through acts
of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when
these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no
matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take
this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the
inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become
the crucifiers.
“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman
historian Tacitus wrote of those the emperor Nero singled out for
torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by
dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the
flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had
expired.”
Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.
We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden
parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in
dispute.
But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive?
How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous
suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even
content?
Who were Nero’s guests?
We are Nero’s guests.
History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge
us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all
agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the
apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we
did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red
Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was
set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our
power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the
fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal
victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do
not, you are culpable.
“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian
struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The
Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those
who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.
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Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for
Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global
terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award
for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from
Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
