Genocide Blog 16 – On an Israeli State that Strips Men Naked and Parades Them
12.12.2023
Whenever we think the Israeli State’s war crimes have hit rock bottom – barricading a whole people into a Medieval siege, starving families to death, bombing children from the air, sea and land, aiming at and then destroying hospital-after-hospital, killing journalists, UN staff and hospital workers on purpose and by the dozen – then they do something morally even worse. Last week, the Israeli Defense Force paraded Palestinian men taken prisoner in public – old and young, healthy and clearly fragile – all stripped near-naked, and filmed them. Are the Israeli leaders stark raving mad? How can they do such a cruel and inhuman thing? Do they not see the echoes of colonialism? Of Nazism in these crimes? Everyone knows this constitutes a war crime.
The men thus humiliated have been identified as including a journalist, a shop-keeper, a well-known Gaza tin-smith and a school headmaster. The men were filmed first made to crouch naked on the edge of the pavement, then lined up in rows in the middle of a road, kneeling, then seen in lorries with hands bound and blind-folded paraded around Gaza City, and then taken, literally kidnapped and driven to Israel. There, we see some 50 men blindfolded, hand-cuffed behind their backs, and kneeling in a bit of bulldozed quarry of some kind. All of the men were merely sheltering from the Israeli bombing in a UN compound, already driven from their homes towards ever-smaller concentration camps by the IDF. There are credible reports of torture, men’s wrists injured from the hand-cuffs, men and boys having had cold water sprayed on them, and many were beaten and left without water or food.
And yet US leader Joe Biden and the US Congress continue to pay for this?
The US pays in two senses. First, they foot the bill for the whole Israeli architecture of torture and genocide against the people of Palestine in terms of the military hardware and sheer dollars given in aid. Second, Biden pays in terms of his popularity as president, which has fallen to well below even Republican candidate Nicki Haley’s, let alone the dangerous clown, Donald Trump’s. And the whole US empire falls into the disrepute this Israeli horror gives rise to. As the US representative at the UN puts his hand up to impose a US veto on no more than a simple “humanitarian ceasefire” that aims to put a pause on the Israeli slaughter of Palestinian families, he is putting a hand up for the end of any reputation that the USA may ever have had in the world. All the US past crimes – like the US atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the genocidal fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo, like the killing of civilians in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria – have all been brought to the surface of our memories, when Netanyahu refers to them to justify his own State’s genocide of the people of Palestine. “Western civilization” is being exposed as barbarism.
And then, when we think the Israeli State has hit the bottom, it does something worse.
It filmed men – again stripped naked – supposedly surrendering their weapons. So, the public humiliation, the undressing and filming, of Palestinian men continued. And what on earth does the IDF think we, the people of the world, are? Idiots? What are naked, captured men still doing with their guns in their possession? It doesn’t make sense. What does it mean? Except that the Israeli State has truly exposed the hideous fascism, in all the ugliness at its core.
On top of all that it turns out that it was a completely staged, tricked bit of film – just like the last staged, tricked bit of film that the BBC debunked, when the IDF were showing hand-picked journalists supposed proof of weapons under the Al Shifa Hospital. There was a watch on the hand of an IDF soldier that showed a time before the actual visit of the hand-picked journalists. In the new mendacious clips, there is one take with an old man holding up in the air his hand-gun in his left hand and rifle in his right hand, and the other one with his hand- gun in his right hand and his rifle in his left hand. This truly shows the rotten end of the rotten Western colonization project in all its now anachronistic barbarity.
Our Government must at once suspend all diplomatic links with Israel, and put an end to any contracts with Israeli companies for waterworks in Rodrigues or electricity or prison projects in main Island Mauritius. It is time to cut all links possible with a State committing genocide. The USA, to the extent that it supplies the arms, the diplomatic support, and the money to the Israeli State committing the genocide before our eyes, must also prepare to suffer isolation.
World-wide it is the people – in their unions, political parties, associations – that are exposing and opposing the Israeli genocide on the Palestinian people. We must continue to do so, and to force our governments to act. This depends upon exposing the Israeli propaganda machine, which is turbo-propelled by the Western media. The next blog will try to expose this propaganda machine.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
