Blog 11 – Colonial Punitive Raids and a Rebellion inside White House
29.11.2023
President Biden is facing a rebellion inside the White House. Yes, his own staff in the White House are rebelling against his continued support for the Bibi Netanyahu genocide. A bit late. And not enough to change things enough to prevent further genocide ... not yet. But, a rebellion? Can we believe this?
A few days ago, 26 November, even the Washington Post, a newspaper outlet that is to Biden as TASS is to Putin, says so. Staffers warned Biden, for example, not to include talk about the supposed “decapitated babies” in his press briefing because it was unverified, or more precisely it was an IDF rumour, worse still a fabricated lie. The Israeli authorities have retracted it. Biden ignored his staffers. He went ahead and talked about “decapitated babies”. Not only that, even after it was found to be a total invention, he again made this accusation a second time. On the principle, we can only suppose, that he needs to nurture outrage and mass hysteria to whip up support and maintain it for an ongoing genocide that he is funding and arming.
In fact, the truth is this: the newspaper Haaretz has published the full list of Israeli victims of the 7 October Hamas-led incursion into Israel. The deaths have been brought down by the Israeli Authorities from 1,400 to 1,200 and now to 1, 147. 300 were soldiers, now it seems maybe a higher number. So, 800 civilian deaths. It is a very high number.
There is one baby on the list. She is called Millie Cohen. She was 10 months old and shot by Hamas in cross-fire as the Israeli army counter-attacked to rout the Hamas incursion. There is no claim that she was decapitated.
In fact, we must begin to look at the Israeli propaganda closely.
As soon as the Israeli Authorities had to retract the “40 babies decapitated” lie, a lie that caused mass-hysteria in the Western World where people do not yet know about the decades of Israeli state’s bare-faced lies, those close to the IDF came up with an alternative story for a few days about an Israeli baby having supposedly been “cooked in an oven”. Horrific enough to fuel further mass hysteria Western-world-wide. This turned out to be a transparent plastic bag of body-parts of adults after a fire, now believed to have been a result of Israeli hell-fire missiles launched from IDF helicopters in the counter-attack. The photos of the sizzled cars, houses and bodies have been removed from IDF sites because they look like textbook photos of victims of hell-fire missiles fired from the Israeli’s own USA-supplied Apache Helicopters. They fired indiscriminately in order to repel the incursion – killing Hamas militants, any captives they had with them, and any Israeli citizens in the neighbourhood. Haaretz reports that the IDF was also “compelled” to fire from the air on their own main military base at the Erez Crossing. Many Hamas men and Israelis were killed by the IDF – from helicopter fire, from tanks and by infantry. This is part of the “Hannibal directive” which means when there are Israeli captives, IDF soldiers can shoot them if they are with those abducting them.
But, let us get back to the Israeli propaganda lies that the US has spread so as to justify the Israeli-US genocide, and put it in colonial perspective – so that people can understand the hideous process, and then, together, we can act so as to stop the genocide.
This reliance on grotesque lies was common in settler colonies. It was used for the German genocide against the Hereros and Nam people in Namibia over a hundred years ago. It took 100 years for the German State to begin to apologise. It was used for the German genocide against the Jewish people and Roma people 80 years ago. Now the German state is participating in its third genocide – its export of armaments to Israel has multiplied by 10 times since 7 October – in just over 100 years.
And all over the colonial world, for centuries, the barbarism of western colonization included what the British called “punitive raids”, which were inevitably in response to either a real one-off horrific crime of some kind against a settler, or an invented one. It was most often somewhere in between i.e. based on a rumour of a gross act of violence, during what was a real, justified armed struggle against the military occupation of a whole society. The armed struggle of the oppressed, in colonial times, “had” to be described by the oppressor as outside the realm of “ordinary criminal behavior” that could be dealt with in courts. It “must” be portrayed as an outrage committed by “the barbarians” that is so hideous and against a “civilized” victim so innocent, that it demanded biblical annihilation as peremptory punishment, and not any judicial process. This practice of punitive raids is a hallmark of colonization.
Bibi-and-Biden have, over a period of 6 weeks, perpetrated in Gaza, and intend to continue if we can’t stop them after the nerve-wracking truce, a nuclear-propelled “punitive raid”. It is a colonial punishment. In the days when colonization is supposed to be over and done with. And it must stop.
They have held the people of Palestine living in Gaza in a strangle-hold by their “total military siege”, and then bombed them from above, shelled them from new USA-donated tanks and from ships in the Mediterranean, to the toll of over 15,000 civilians massacred, another few thousand still lie buried under the rubble of the buildings the IDF has blown up, and the vast majority of both totals are children, women and the aged and infirm.
These are the real decapitated people, children and all. Their deaths are not rumours. We have seen them massacred live on TV by the IDF bombs.
The IDF has forcibly removed over a million people from their homes in northern Gaza, and made them march southwards, as if ready for expulsion, with the rest of the people of Gaza, to the Sinai Desert in Egypt. Biblical echoes. As vowed in his genocidal statement by Netanyahu.
This way Israel gets land to colonize, Gaza, and gets resources, Gaza’s natural-gas-rich sea whose contracts are being signed since 7 October by companies from US, UK and Italy. Just like the pillage of early Western colonization.
But, the IDF has gone further back into Western historical barbarism. To the Middle Ages. It has cut off supplies of water, food, electricity and cooking fuel by means of a siege. Can you believe a State acting so as to cut off people’s food and water? In 2023? On purpose?
They have gone even further.
The IDF has intentionally bombed the hospitals and the schools, the UN buildings, the churches, mosques and civil authority buildings, so as to make Gaza uninhabitable for a long, long time. And we cannot yet stop them from going back to do this after the truce?
This ceasefire is just not good enough. It must be permanent. No more bombs.
We need an end to this Israeli colonization. We need an end to Israeli impunity and lies. We need an end to the Israeli siege. We need an end to the Israeli racism and Apartheid. We need an end to the genocide.
Israel’s response to the 7 October incursion is so utterly barbaric a response that it is no wonder there is a rebellion by young staffers in the White House. I hope old staffers also rebel against this kind of cruel and inhuman, utterly colonial genocide based on nothing other than the oppressors’ race-hatred, and propelled by none other than the very same kinds of hysterical propaganda used to justify centuries of “punitive raids” on the native peoples of the world. And then the Western-civilization hypocrites stand there saying: “Why is it that the Third World does not stand with Israel?” The answer is: “The perception of who exactly the barbarians are” is changing – amongst the peoples of the world, even within the Western imperialist countries.
The name used in colonial times says it all: “a punitive raid”. That was a formal military expression. The anachronism of the USA and Israel still perpetrating such punitive raids is what is shocking.
Whole British regiments would get orders to go “destroy a village”, bring back loot, and get a bonus as part of a “punitive raid”. A punitive raid was in response to a group of the colonized people from Village X having, say, killed a colonizer with a poisoned arrow, or stolen an ox from a colonizer for a second time, or raped a woman settler. Or maybe settlers were only rumoured to have been killed, robbed or raped. Or maybe a mixture. These punitive raids were common in Australia against the Aboriginal people, in the USA and Canada against the First Nation people, almost all over Africa and India, the Americas, and in Arab countries, including in pre-1948 Palestine.
The end of colonization ought to have brought the end of “punitive raids”.
But history has left this anachronistic settler colony: Israel. So settler colonization has not ended – Israel continues until this minute – nor has its hideous barbarism ended, including the collective punishment of “punitive raids”.
Night before last night in the West Bank, the Israeli military killed a teenage boy. Every day the IDF has since 7 October been meting out “collective punishment” and “punitive raids”against Palestinians: arresting them at an accelerated rate, killing more Palestinians than the “usual” hideous rate, demolishing the homes of people related to someone accused of something or nothing, more often than the usual rate, and beginning to deprive those in prison of food and water as punishment, since the 7 October. Settlers are given the protection of the IDF to kill Palestinians, make them flee, rob them of their land.
The Washington Post, Biden’s own rag, in the same article, says: “ ‘Biden has banged Bibi really hard on settler violence and civilian casualties in private’, one [White House] official said.”
Supposedly Biden has a secret hard line against the very genocide he so publicly funds. Tell us another one.
Enough of his colonizer-lies.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
