Genocide Blog 28 – Israeli Insanity Laid Bare alongside USA Responsibility
31.01.2024
Who would have thought 12 Israeli Ministers and 15 other members of the Israeli Knesset (MPs) would be singing and dancing together, at a Conference in Jerusalem, calling for Israel to launch colonial settlements in the rubble of the genocide of Gaza? In public? It was lunatic behavior. I could not believe my eyes. And yet we all saw it. A macabre dance straight out of a Joseph Conrad depiction of colonization gone stark raving mad. And it was not just the fascist members of the Knesset, Ben G’vir and Bezalel Smotrich, who were chanting and jumping up and down but Netanyahu’s Likud Party members, too, amounting to one-third of his Cabinet. And then, even this, this genocidal land-grab pantomime by the Israeli State does not cause the USA and UK to immediately suspend military aid to the Israeli Army carrying out the genocide? No. They are merely “concerned” by it.
By contrast, to make this pantomime of madness even worse, even more mad, a mere allegation by the habitually lying Israeli State that 12 UNRWA employees out of 30,000 UNRWA staff, of which 13,000 work in Gaza, were involved in the 7 October Hamas incursion into Israel, causes immediate suspension of USA and UK contributions to UNRWA, UNRWA being the only organization that can implement the ICJ binding judgment that calls for humanitarian aid to enter Gaza unimpeded by Israel. The USA and UK thus act so as to prevent “the prevention of genocide”. This is complicity in genocide. This they know how to do. But, they do not know how to prevent the genocide expressed in the lunatic pantomime by the Israeli State at the insane Conference in Jerusalem. The USA and UK, and this is madness too, pretend not to know very well that Israel is up to its usual tricks. It makes this accusation against UNRWA the very day after the ICJ judgment against Israel for plausibly committing genocide. Israel is merely implementing the genocide by other means i.e. by killing off UNRWA, the one institution capable of attenuating the impending mass killing by Israel of Palestinians by starving them, causing disease and epidemics to spread amongst them in the overcrowded “herding” they are perpetrating on Palestinian families, and killing them through hypothermia in flimsy tents in that windy, rainy cold when they have ruined all the hospitals by bombing them to smithereens. So, to summarize, the USA and UK can get their bureaucracies to suspend the payment of contributions that could save Palestinians (on the grounds of mere Israeli allegations at a suspiciously strange time) concerning an infinitely small proportion of UNRWA employees, but nothing the Israeli State does makes them suspend their arms supplies, the cash flow, and the diplomatic cover, even if one-third of the Cabinet does a frenzied genocidal dance to colonize Gaza, already reduced to genocidal rubble? Will there be yet another UN veto to cover up the genocide, and allow its perpetration to continue?
And meanwhile, even more strange Israeli State behavior is exposed to the world. The Israelis send another of their sealed containers containing stolen and returned Palestinian corpses. They confiscated the dead, including children, by the nameless dozen – some it seems stolen from graveyards, others it seems taken off the bombardment fields – and kept them till they rotted and were no longer recognizable. Then they came and handed them over in blue body bags. What more macabre behavior can one imagine than this? It is beyond genocide, and has gone into the realm of psychotic cruelty.
The USA and UK still do not suspend their arms and cash.
And this is not all.
The Israeli State has also, again in the past day or two, conducted wild demonstrations of its cruelty and insanity. It has now gone into the macabre theatre of genocidal frenzy. The IDF instructed Gazans to leave Khan Younis (where they were initially forced to move to). And when they are fleeing by the family group, as ordered, even further South towards Rafah, the IDF pulls out all the young (or not-old) men, imprisons the lot of them, strips them down, blindfolds them, ties their hands behind their backs, and proceeds to clothe them, again insanely, in what looks like the same white plastic used for dealing with the bodies of the 27,000 Palestinians the IDF has already slaughtered. As if it is a threat of what’s to come for them. It is a taunt.
Is the Israeli State stone mad?
What does Biden say to this operetta of the deranged Israeli State? What does Sunak say? Does it end its arms and its money to Israel?
Equally bizarre and profoundly lunatic, is the pantomime of IDF special forces dressing themselves up as Palestinian doctors and nurses, filmed and all, going into a hospital in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and assassinating a patient in his hospital bed in cold blood. Shooting him, splashing the blood on to the hospital wall behind him. Turning a place of care into I-don’t-know-what. And assassinating two people with him. All this is seen on surveillance cameras and shown to the world.
What does Biden say to this? What does Sunak say? Do they suspend their bank-rolling of Israel?
The level of madness spreads. When Nancy Pelosi former Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives, back in the USA, is confronted near her house by pro-Palestinian demonstrators against this madness, calling simply for a ceasefire, what does she call out to them? “Go back to China!” So, she too has lost it.
In a way, it is no wonder. She, a mother and grandmother, has seen all the pantomimes: the mad conference-goer Israeli Cabinet Ministers dancing in a frenzy of patriarchy to go colonize Gaza, while she and her Party pay for and arm them; the mad suspension of contributions to UNRWA, the only organization anywhere that can perhaps stop the unfurling mass killings of children and mothers, grannies and granddads, even as she, as Democratic leadership member, goes on paying for the IDF to continue its killing spree; the mad return of rotten corpses in a ship’s container, that she subsidizes with US taxpayers’ money; the mad dressed-up-as-medics murderers doing state-sponsored murders with weapons she supplies.
As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, “No worst, there is none.”
When will the USA and UK pull back from this? It is, after all, the USA and UK that are responsible.
Biden admitted yesterday his guilt. When asked, in this very moment, if he holds Iran responsible for killing three US soldiers in a US base in Jordan, he replies, “I do hold them [Iran] responsible, in the sense that they supply the weapons to the people who did it” (ABC News video). So, if we apply that to himself, he is holding himself responsible for the Israeli genocide, and even for all the stark raving lunatic excesses of the genocide that are being acted out in all those gory pantomimes on our TVs and computer screens. He, after all, “supplies the weapons to the people who did it”, to use his own words. How does he even sleep at night?
It is almost unbelievable what is happening as the USA-UK empire unravels, world-wide, but starting from its perhaps most egregious spot on the planet: the Israeli State that it funds, arms and supports in its genocide against the people of Palestine.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT.
