The truth never dies but is made to live as a beggar: Yiddish proverb
NB: For the terminally racist Western establishment, no amount of mass suffering of innocents is going to be enough. It is they, led by the USA who are enabling this enormity. Here’s an American expert in urban warfare, saying Israel is upholding the laws of war; and not committing any war crimes. I suspect his expert opinion would have been different if undefended children from his family had been bombed by Arab or Chinese bomber pilots. And of course, history began on October 7, 2023. He has no knowledge of the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948; nor does he recall the Sabra-Shatila massacre of Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982 – for which Ariel Sharon was held responsible (but still became Prime Minister); nor does he mention the fact that the West Bank has been subject to forced expulsions by Israeli settlers, and that Gaza and the West Bank are territories under illegal occupation since 1967.
That’s 56 years with no hope of a free and dignified existence. Biden and the other leaders of the ‘free world’ talk endlessly about a two-state solution, but they don’t seem to have done much about it, and the only time a settlement was at hand, the peace making Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, in 1995, by an Israeli extremist. Our expert in urban warfare doesn’t know that collective retribution on an unarmed population, women and children is the established Israeli policy and has been for decades. Or maybe he does, and chooses to ignore it.
He’s terminally, irredeemably racist; and like him, a vast section of the US establishment is deaf, dumb and blind on these matters. But then what may we expect from the USA, which killed over 3 million Vietnamese from 1963 to 1973, before they were kicked out by the NLF.
The article below is an excellent comment from Mukul Kesavan. But its not just the end of Western hypocrisy. Its the tipping point, the catastrophic implosion of the ideology of the ‘free world’; of the very concept of the liberal world order. The soaring profits of the arms trade; the growing intolerance of dissent; the rampaging assaults on innocent persons of various faiths, not for what they did but for what they are; the towering weight of mass brutality in Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, Chile, Argentina, Grenada, etc., etc, It’s over, gentlemen: your talk of freedom and democracy and ‘humanitarian’ warfare are so much sand in our mouths. Many others have come to the same conclusion. Read this article by Arwa Mahdawi. She says she does not want to hear western democracies lecture the rest of the world on human rights ever again. I couldn’t agree with her more.
In India today, even standing on the road with placards with the name Palestine, or the Palestinian flag, leads to arrests. Palestine has been criminalised; whilst the outpost of Western civilisation murders Palestinians. Keep on rocking in the free world.
That Netanyahu quotes from the Bible to justify his mass murder of innocents renders me speechless. Some members of his cabinet were actually on the US state department terror watchlist. One of them called for using nuclear weapons on Gaza. I have placed some arguments and information here and here; but the list is endless. Its the final proof that we live in the age of imploding ideology. DS
Read this report: Wounded Child No Surviving Family
Yair Wallach warns that “[p]ermanent mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a very possible scenario in the event of a regional escalation.” If Israel’s invasion and the razing of Gaza force Palestinians into Egypt, it will be, as it was with the Rohingyas, a war crime, not a ‘humanitarian relocation’. To watch charter members of the rules-based world order legitimise the collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza has been an education. If anything good is to emerge from this dreadful war, let it be the death of Western doublespeak.
The main concern of Western governments is to buy Israel time to do the punitive killing that it feels is necessary before the civilian death toll becomes unseemly.
Israel’s ‘incursions’ into Gaza follow a pattern. The main concern of Western governments and mainstream Western media is to create a justificatory narrative that will buy Israel time to do the punitive killing that it feels is necessary before the civilian death toll becomes unseemly.
The savagery of Hamas’s mass murder of civilians gave Israel a reason to attack Gaza and forced its ambushed politicians and military to promise that this assault on Gaza would level the enclave and uproot Hamas. Unlike previous bombardments and invasions of Gaza, this one would be more ambitious and, therefore, more violent. More civilians would die and their deaths would need more elaborate justifications over an extended period.
The Economist published an article on international humanitarian law which explained that collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths needed to be proportionate to the military objective of the assault. The proportionality here was not to be reckoned in the number of civilians who died incidentally; in a densely populated enclave like Gaza where Hamas is embedded in the population, its ‘uprooting’ could, theoretically, justify a large, unquantifiable death toll. This was one way in which public opinion could be prepared for large death tolls that dwarfed Hamas’s murder of civilians in Israel.
The next step was to discredit the death toll itself. After a disagreement about the number of people killed by missile/bomb at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, some Western analysts and reporters argued that the casualty figures put out by the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza could not be trusted. This was curious because UN agencies and global media outlets had routinely used these figures before.
The US president joined in, saying that he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Gaza’s health ministry responded by publishing a list of nearly 7,000 people killed in the Israeli bombardment, complete with names and identity card numbers. It was a peculiarly revealing moment, coming as it did when civilian casualty figures, especially the numbers of children killed, began to spike and draw the attention and sympathy of Western civil society.
The unqualified support for Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza, including the cutting off of fuel, water and food, by the likes of Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was spun as a way of establishing trust with Israel’s political leadership before pivoting to a counsel of restraint and humanitarian aid. Gideon Rachman wrote a column in the Financial Times where he endorsed the idea that the “… best chance of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.”
Twelve days later, Gaza has no drinking water, no electricity, no internet connectivity and the death toll is headed towards 8,000. The long-signalled military invasion of Gaza has begun. The humanitarian aid that, Rachman argued, justified the West’s embrace of Netanyahu has barely arrived. The whole notion of the United States of America and its European satellites as honest brokers in this war is implausible. Biden’s relative interest in war and peace can be measured by the fact that he asked Congress to sanction 14 billion dollars in military aid to Israel and 100 million dollars for relief supplies to Gaza. Biden is Israel’s second in this contest, he isn’t the referee.
When Israel ordered the entire population of northern Gaza to move south to ostensibly minimise civilian casualties, some Israeli officials and their chorus in the mainstream press began to explore a more ambitious idea: the relocation of large numbers of Gaza’s Palestinians over the border in Egypt’s Sinai desert. The Financial Times ran a story about the prospect of Gazan refugees ‘looming’ over Egypt.
But, as always, it was The Economist that amplified the idea and spun it as a humanitarian game changer. In a piece that was so disingenuous that it couldn’t have been parodied by The Onion, The Economist argued that Israel had to destroy Hamas and the only way of avoiding more civilian casualties than necessary wasn’t Israeli restraint but the relocation of Gazans to Sinai.
Israeli bombing has already displaced more Palestinians in Gaza than the Nakba did in 1948. Much of Gaza’s population consists of the descendants of refugees from that first catastrophe. Arab countries are studded with Palestinian refugee camps that are now permanent settlements. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs helped create modern Israel. The idea that the coerced displacement of Gaza’s Palestinians via violent bombardment into refugee camps in Egypt is a reasonable solution to the present crisis is grotesque. The fig leaf The Economist proposes for this act of naked ethnic cleansing is that this exile would be temporary. The US, Israel and well-meaning Arab states would guarantee this. And pigs have wings.
The forced expulsion of a community over an international border amounts to ethnic cleansing. This is what happened to the Rohingya, a Muslim community in Myanmar, in 2017. Nearly a million Rohingya were violently driven out of Rakhine province and into Bangladesh where they remain in slum-like camps. In a piece in the New Statesman, Yair Wallach warns that “[p]ermanent mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a very possible scenario in the event of a regional escalation.” If Israel’s invasion and the razing of Gaza force Palestinians into Egypt, it will be, as it was with the Rohingyas, a war crime, not a ‘humanitarian relocation’.
To watch charter members of the rules-based world order legitimise the collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza has been an education. If anything good is to emerge from this dreadful war, let it be the death of Western doublespeak.
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Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is the latest in a Long History of such Massacres
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues
Israel-Hamas War: US arms industry stocks rocket (October 10)
Patrick Lawrence: Deeper Into Depravity
No Path to Ending Bloodshed If Palestinian Rights Continue to Be Denied
Chris Hedges: Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them
The Shame That Will Follow Netanyahu Will Be Far Greater Than the One He Attempted to Escape
We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
After the truth-shower 