Shejaiya Neighborhood in Gaza/Mahmoud Hams (AFP)/Getty Images
The Israeli army is one of the most powerful in the world, usually ranked around fourth in firepower. It can deploy a half a million troops with a panoply of state-of-the-art weaponry—from body armor, integrated electronic communications and control, and sniper rifles, to tanks, artillery, airpower, drones, ships, and submarines—and, of course, an arsenal of nuclear weapons that have been in development over fifty years. It is backed by the most powerful armed force in the world, which continuously supplies it with whatever arms, cash, intelligence, and political and diplomatic support it needs—an effective guarantee of military (though not political) victory.
There
are a few thousand militants armed with light infantry weapons and homemade
rockets among the 1.8 million people in Gaza, one of the most densely-populated
territories on earth. Those 1.8 million people have been locked into that territory
by Israel (abetted by its Egyptian ally, and backed by its American patron),
which controls the entry and exit of every person and particle, making Gaza
what even British Prime Minister David Cameron (who helps to enable this
policy) calls
a “prison camp.” This siege has been Israel’s way of punishing the 1.8 million
people of Gaza for, among other things, having freely and fairly elected leaders
that Israel doesn’t like.
What
we’ve been witnessing in Gaza for the past month is this Israeli-American war
machine relentlessly pummeling those captive 1.8 million fish in a barrel
people, and deliberately destroying their
social infrastructure, on a scale that is almost unimaginable. The Israeli-American war machine has used all its
modern weaponry to blow up homes, schools, hospitals, water and power plants—demolishing
and depopulating whole neighborhoods, and killing any number of civilians and
children (at least 380) that it pleases. When it’s the equivalent of gatling
guns vs. arrows, when the civilian casualty
rates are 4% on one “side” and 86% on the other, it’s not a war, it’s a
massacre.
Self-defense?
Puhlease. Rob Kall, of opednews.com,
speaking of a previous Israeli massacre, gives
a gruesomely apt image: “I told my son it would be like him throwing a balled
up piece of paper at me and me coming back with a hammer smashing him in the
head and face repeatedly.” Just like, if you’ve seen the picture
I included in a previous
post.
The
arguments about Israel defending itself, doing its best to avoid civilian
casualties, having the most moral army in the world, etc., would be risible if
they weren’t so despicable. It’s important, for those who claim to care about
such things, to point out that Israel’s intentional, deliberate, announced plan
has always been to create as much suffering as possible for the 1.8 million
people in Gaza. Further, its announced war strategy is that, faced with any resistance
from any population that it decides, in its moral wisdom, to target and/or
subjugate, it will inflict disproportionate violence on the civilian infrastructure
and whole population. Such a strategy is meant both to prove Israel’s will and capacity
to force compliance, and to uphold the Israeli ethic that it’s right and
fitting to destroy an entire Arab neighborhood—civilians be damned—in order to protect,
or revenge,
the life of one Israeli soldier.
This
is, for those who claim to care about such things, a policy of war crime. This
policy rests on three indisputably criminal pillars, which I’ll describe
briefly: diet, lawn-mowing, and Dahiya.
Diet:
As one Israeli official proudly proclaimed, Israel is deliberately keeping the
1.8 million people of Gaza “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” As Noam Chomsky points out,
Israel calculates, “precisely how many calories a day Gazans needed for bare
survival, while also depriving them of medicines and other means of decent life.”
This is the deliberate, sadistic, ongoing punishment of a whole population
trapped in a ghetto. A crime.
Lawn-mowing:
In addition to the ongoing siege and starvation of those 1.8 million people,
every couple of years Israel undertakes what it calls “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. As Chomsky says, this is “Israel’s cheery expression
for its periodic exercises of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a ‘war
of defense.’” This is Israel’s periodic dis-maintenance, which ensures the Gaza
polity will never be able to stand on its own two feet, and, Israel hopes, reminds
the people of Gaza that resistance is futile. Another sadistic crime of collective
punishment.
Dahiya: Named after the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, which Israel destroyed in one of their previous massacres in 2006. This strategy, which has been elevated to a general military doctrine,
involves deliberately targeting and destroying a
civilian neighborhood by air and artillery, rather than risking the precious
lives of Israeli soldiers looking for armed adversaries. As an Israeli general laid
it out:
What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. ….This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.The plan. Approved. Although you won’t hear that on CNN. It’s a war crime, announced in advance. For those who claim to care about such things.
We all know—Israel certainly does—that this is
possible only because Israel is granted impunity for these war crimes by the United
States government and media.
But, let’s leave the slaughter of thousands of
civilians aside for a moment. The other tiny little thing we might notice, as
the people of Detroit are being deprived of water, is that all of this
deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure and neighborhoods at Israel’s
whim is only possible because Israel knows that the United States of America
will pay for the destruction and (along
with Europe) for the rebuilding—up to the point, of course, that Israel
decides will not “make them [Gazans] die of hunger.” And the U.S. will pay
again, for the next round, ad infinitum
(unless we act with determination to stop it). Mow, rake, repeat.
What a deal! This is beyond impunity. Israel may be
having a hard time bringing the Palestinians to heel, but it sure has the Americans
well-tamed.
Notes and links
Related Polemicist posts:
Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy
Murder at a Discount: Pricing Lives in Israel
Dropping a DIME: Max Blumenthal and the Erosion of Liberal Zionism
David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’ theguardian.com.
Related Polemicist posts:
Israel's "Human Shield" Hypocrisy
Murder at a Discount: Pricing Lives in Israel
Dropping a DIME: Max Blumenthal and the Erosion of Liberal Zionism
David Cameron: Israeli blockade has turned Gaza Strip into a ‘prison camp’ theguardian.com.
The Jews learned a lot from Hitlers Germany on how to subjugate a population penned in a Ghetto.
ReplyDeleteHow sad that so few people know about this site, while CNN has the
ReplyDeleteprivilege to propagandize so many Americans on a regular basis in regard to
this Criminal State.
I have always maintained that Blitz Wolfer is most likely an agent of the Mossad. He was an obscure reporter at Haaretz before suddenly being plucked out of Israel to become CNN's Pentagon Correspondent. Shortly thereafter, he was elevated to his current anchorman job and CNN became the All-Israel-All- the-Time Network for a while.
Although CNN had toned back its all-Israeli coverage in order to cover non-issues like lost airplanes and Benghazi, they stand ever ready to defend Israel's right to commit War Crimes against a defenseless population. This is basically what they have tried to do this time around, but there are new players on the block, like Al Jazeera America, which have broadcast the images that have belied the officially approved narrative for US Audiences.
Like the images of carnage being broadcast into our living rooms during the Vietnam War, these pictures and reports are making Americans confront the reality of our support for Israel for the first time in years. Unfortunately for a lot of the networks that have been forced to broadcast these unfortunate reports, their voice over no longer matches the image on the screen.