For the past 13 months, the world has witnessed a campaign of carnage waged by the State of Israel against the people of Gaza on a scale unprecedented in this century. Not even the bombings against Nazi Germany at the end of World War II match the destruction and killing inflicted by the Jewish State on the territory and people of the Gaza Strip.
Most disturbing is the number of children killed, maimed, and made orphans by the Israeli siege. Since October 7th of last year, Israel has killed over 17,000 children, including 2100 infants and toddlers under the age of two, with an estimated 19,000 childrenorphaned. By comparison, 564 children have been killed in the conflict in Ukraine, emphasizing just how unprecedented is the scale of Israel’s assault on the territory.*
The siege of Gaza is called a “war,” but such a description belies the truth of this onslaught. On one side is one of the most powerful military machines in the world bombarding Gaza incessantly with an arsenal of advanced aircraft, military drones, naval gun boats, and tanks. By contrast, the Gazans on the receiving end of these daily attacks are among the poorest people on the planet, who have no means to defend themselves; no planes, no naval gunships, no tanks, not even any anti-aircraft batteries.
To invoke the term, “self-defense,” for Israel’s campaign, — repeated endlessly by Israel’s rulers along with its backers in the Biden Administration — is truly Orwellian. It is utterly inconceivable how self-defense could include the wholesale destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, electrical generating stations, water treatment facilities, flour mills and bakeries, along with the massive destruction of homes and individual property and the killing of defenseless people in these establishments by the tens of thousands.
What Israel is doing in Gaza at this very moment — bombing people in tents and refugee camps; massacring people seeking shelter and limited medical care in the few remaining hospitals; and using its power to withhold food, water and medicines from the area — has no aim other than simply killing scores of Palestinians in Gaza. Added to this unspeakable brutality is the scandalous concentration camps established by Israel for “prisoners” it has essentially abducted from Gaza where it has engaged systematically in torture of abductees, that has been defended by members of the Israeli cabinet and Israeli MPs. It is time to label such conduct with a very different descriptor. It is the work of a state-sponsored death squad.
What is equally indefensible about this conduct is how the U.S. has become an accomplice to this criminality.
The origins of this collaboration in crime between the U.S. and Israel actually derive from the Cold War. Until 1967, U.S. support for Israel was uneven, but after Israel thoroughly vanquished the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, in June of that year, the U.S. believed it had a partner in the region capable of neutralizing those in the Arab world aligned with the Soviet Union. In addition to Egypt and Syria, one of the key forces in the region supported by the USSR was the Palestinian national movement.
What America found in Israel was an actor with a common interest in seeking to thwart a major regional political force supported by the USSR. In the parlance of Noam Chomsky, Israel became America’s “cop on the beat” in the Middle East. This role that only intensified after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 when the U.S. lost its other major Middle East ally. This partnership between Israel and the U.S. has continued unabated to this day, cemented even more firmly by one of the most powerful political lobbying forces in the world, the Israel Lobby, better known as the America Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC.
If Israel emerged as America’s cop on the beat after 1967, AIPAC assumed a similar role as Israel’s cop in the U.S., buying off the American political establishment and ensuring that no dissenting voices on Israel emerged in American political life. What better metaphor for the influence of this lobby than the 58 standing ovations given by hundreds of U.S. Congressional figures to the Prime Minister of Israel when he delivered a speech in the U.S. Senate this past summer proudly affirming the virtues of his country’s genocidal brutality in Gaza. Such fealty to Israel in the U.S. Congress aligned perfectly with the refrain of the Biden Administration that “America stands with Israel.”
Although initially it was Israel that was the junior partner in the relationship, it is now the U.S. that is the servile underling doing the bidding of the Jewish State including aiding and abetting the latter in its murderous conduct in Gaza.
The U.S. is supplying the overwhelming bulk of the weaponry used by Israel in its onslaught in Gaza – and now Lebanon — while assisting the Jewish State with billions in additional aid and diplomatic cover at the United Nations. Less obvious is the how this subservience is manifested in the blatant deception that officials in the Biden Administration are conveying to the American public about their “tireless efforts” to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza.
Proffered most notably by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the discourse about a ceasefire has been publicly disowned repeatedly by the State of Israel itself which has insisted that it will not lay down its arms. The Administration even admits to its own duplicity regarding this so-called ceasefire with its ongoing shipments of armaments to the Israeli Defense Force used by the latter in its murderous assaults against the people of Gaza. Consequently, when Blinken speaks of the need for a ceasefire, while at the same time the U.S. Government continues its weekly shipments of armaments to Israel for its daily bombardments of the Palestinians in Gaza, the hypocrisy is stark, and the message is unmistakable. Go ahead, the U.S. tells its ally, continue the carnage.
Sadly, the upcoming Presidential contest offers little hope for change even though roughly two thirds of the U.S. public want this brutality to end. Both candidates are virtually certain to continue aiding and arming the Jewish State, with Harris explicitly emphasizing Israel’s right to defend itself, and repeating the commitment to continue the arms flow for Israel’s “defense.” There is nothing in what Israel is doing, however, in killing and maiming children by the tens of thousands and obliterating the basis of bare life in Gaza that is defensible.
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