Post No. 998 - Gaza, Again

 “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. 

Well & Truly

“First of all, I think it’s been totally consistent. But here’s what’s been consistent: We killed Soleimani, the number one terrorist in the world by every account, bad person, killed a lot of Americans, killed a lot of people.” Donald J. Trump

Another day in America, another nonsensical statement from King Donald I. Unhinged is the new normal in the nation’s capital. At the rate we’re going, it won’t be long before we see fistfights on the floor of Congress, as was common in the 19th century. Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing. I’d pay good money to see someone knock Mitch McConnell over the head with a walking stick. The man from Kentucky is a toad, and deserves a serious ass-kicking, as do most of the spineless members of the GOP’s Trump Cult.  

I was unaware that Qasem Soleimani was the No. 1 terrorist in the world. I thought that title belonged to Bibi Netanyahu. 

You have to admire the ingenuity of the US when it comes to naming unpleasant acts like assassination, torture and kidnapping. Targeted killing and enhanced interrogation techniques and extraordinary rendition sound more sophisticated. Upstanding nations like the US and Israel and Saudi Arabia would never engage in barbaric conduct like assassination, torture and kidnapping....

Believe that and you may as well believe every one of the more than 15,000 false and misleading statements that have tumbled from Trump’s mouth over the last four years. 

Call me naive, but I was astounded by the US response to the Iraqi parliament’s recent vote to expel all US military forces from the country. The State Department had the gall to make the preposterous claim that the US is a force for good in the Middle East. Try selling that line in Syria or Libya or Yemen. And then the US went full mob boss and told the Iraqi government that all its money held in US banks would be frozen if US forces were expelled. I was under the impression that Iraq was a sovereign nation rather than a US colony. Obviously, I was wrong. I forgot that the US never leaves. 75 years after World War II, US forces remain in Germany and Japan and Italy and Korea, ostensibly for the protection of these nations. Sure. And climate change is a hoax cooked up by the Chinese.  

I’ve never been to Iraq and have never met an Iraqi, but I started imagining a boy who was ten years old when the US launched shock and awe in 2003. To that point, his life revolved around his Baghdad neighborhood, his school, his family, and playing football with his friends. Then the US attacks. Cruise missiles and laser-guided munitions rain down, the ground shakes and fires burn across the city. He must remain indoors, away from the windows. His mother cries softly, his father curses Saddam, curses the US, curses his fate for being born in this country. The boy’s father wishes he could take his family to Canada or Sweden, someplace where it’s safe to venture outside and the electricity remains on. The father lived through US economic sanctions. He knows deprivation firsthand; he knows death, having lost a brother in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980’s. Saddam Hussein was a butcher, but at least under the regime food was plentiful and life had a semblance of normalcy and predictably. It was possible then to hope his son would have an easier life. What could he hope for now? The boy is terrified all the time, afraid to leave the house. 

Americans are conditioned to ignore the suffering of others. American lives matter more, have more value, so what if we kill half a million Iraqis? Or thousands of Afghans? American violence is always justified, cloaked in righteousness, for are we not the world’s champion of freedom and democracy? We’re the good guys. The red, white and blue avengers.  

Right. If only the historical record backed our rhetoric, but it doesn’t, not by a long shot. Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Guatemala, Argentina, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, the list of countries we’ve invaded or meddled in is very long and very bloody. Under the Trump regime we have achieved full rogue nation status. Trump broke the closet door and now we openly, brazenly, enthusiastically, side with tyrants, dictators and zealots. 

In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, “We are well and truly fucked.”