“The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” Editorial, Haaretz, October 8, 2023
I think it’s fair to say that the world doesn’t care about Gaza or the plight of the Palestinians. Since I began this blog in 2004, Israel has pulverized Gaza with disproportionate military force at least five times (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021), causing massive destruction of critical infrastructure and thousands of civilian casualties. Israel targeted hospitals and schools, yet I don’t recall a single American official calling Israel’s actions “evil” or “merciless” or, heaven forbid, a “war crime.” What I remember are assertions from the State Department and the White House that Israel’s right to defend itself was sacrosanct.
To be clear, I’m not defending Hamas for targeting civilians, shooting women and children, and taking more than 100 people hostage. But nor do I accept the idea that the attack by Hamas was unprovoked. The actions of the Netanyahu government in Gaza and the West Bank over the past decade is the provocation. Gaza is one of the most -- if not the most -- densely populated places in the world, often described as an open-air prison due to Israel’s complete control of access points, water, electricity, and the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, and other goods. Israel controls Gaza’s airspace as well as its coastal waters.
In the West Bank, Israeli settlers with the active collusion of the Netanyahu governing coalition, police, the Israeli military and the courts, have waged a merciless campaign to drive Palestinians from their traditional lands, to appropriate Palestinian olive groves and water sources; entire villages have been reduced to rubble by Israeli army bulldozers, schools destroyed, homes invaded. Writing in the October 19, 2023 edition of the New York Review, David Shulman notes that in the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of Israel’s High Court of Justice.
Shulman also writes the following: “The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.”
Once again we see a disparity in the value of human life. The lives of Palestinians are simply not valued as highly as those of Israelis. Palestinians die at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers with no outpouring of shock or sympathy or calls for justice, and the United States certainly doesn’t rush aid to the survivors. Moral outrage is reserved for Israeli victims. Palestinians are dehumanized in the same way that Native Americans and African Americans were during America’s first century and a half. Palestinians are deprived of civil rights, legal redress, and can be killed with impunity, driven off their ancestral lands to make way for Jewish settlers.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a narcissist in the same way that Donald Trump is a narcissist, and like Trump, is under indictment. For fifteen years he has preached division and hatred of Palestinians and surrounded himself with rabid ultra-nationalists. Netanyahu is responsible for the attack by Hamas as surely as Donald Trump is for the January 6 assault on Congress.
I can’t bear to watch or read mainstream American media coverage of this war; it will be presented as a fair fight between equals, which isn’t even close to the reality. While Hamas is clearly being supported from without, presumably by Iran, the support comes nowhere close to what the US provides Israel on an annual basis. Israel has an overwhelming military advantage, the latest advanced missiles and bombs, fighter jets and ordnance.
American media will also remind us that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy, and therefore entitled to our undying support. This assertion is laughable. Netanyahu and his coalition of rabid ultra-nationalists care about democracy about as much as the American Republican Party does, which is to say, very little.
Israel and the United States share an astonishing hubris. Both countries believe themselves entitled to oppress, invade, attack, disenfranchise and expropriate what belongs to others, and both react with shock and rage when those others rise up and strike back.
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