Genocide Blog 37 – The worst and then worse still ...
20.03.2024
Can anything be worse than the Israeli State bombing women and children, the sick and the infirm, the aged and those already injured by past bombing raids? Even as the numbers rise to over 100,000 Palestinians dead and badly injured? Yes, there can be. We have seen the Israeli State literally corralling the Palestinian families of Gaza, as if they were cattle, herding them by means of bombardments, into the very Southern tip of Gaza, ready to expel them into the Sinai Desert of Egypt. And for the past five months, worse still, were worse possible, starving the Palestinian people to death on purpose. And, though Netanyahu and his Smotrich and Ben G’Vir are outlaw fascists, zealots gone mad from the impunity afforded the State of Israel for 75 years, what about President Joe Biden? Biden, who continues to supply the arms for the genocidal bombing? Biden, who guarantees the money to prop up the nose-diving Israeli economy? And who makes his UN representative sit there at the Security Council and raise her hand to veto all resolutions for a ceasefire that might shield the little children? Are these massacres, is this slaughter, is this intentional starvation of the Palestinians, his plan, Biden’s plan, the plan of the US, as a State, as well as being Israel’s plan, after all? And not just the plan of an unhinged Israeli State?
The thought is chilling.
But what other explanation on earth is there?
Why does Biden keep the arms supply flowing? He is not a half-wit. Why does he de-fund the very UNRWA that feeds the little children? Is he a sadist? And why does he let Israel block all the trucks of food?
And then, why on earth does the USA drop huge bundles of food from the air instead, risking killing people underneath, and causing a dangerous free-for-all amongst the starving Palestinians?
And why does Biden propose some hair-brained scheme for taking two months to build a floating bridge to let supplies in, when there are already hundreds, repeat “hundreds” of huge trucks loaded with food, waiting to drive into Gaza? Why let Israel block them? In two months time, how many babies and grannies will have died? The only answer is that the USA wants, like Israel, to wipe out Palestinians – never mind cheap American words to the contrary – and to close down UNRWA. UNRWA is the very institution that has had the role of doing Israel’s work and caring for those under Israel’s occupation, the role of decreasing the suffering of Palestinians displaced on purpose by Israel since 1948, and occupied since 1967. Clearly the USA is helping Israel to destroy UNRWA and is ham-handedly setting up an “alternative” – air-drops and silly bridges that take two months to build, and then no plan how to distribute the food – so long as it is not UNRWA? Israel and the USA have this loony idea that if they destroy UNRWA, which looks after the needs of the Palestinian refugees, they will conveniently destroy the entire concept that Palestinians are refugees.
It was already suspicious when, the very moment Israel announced its lame accusation against UNRWA, the USA on the spot cut its funding to UNRWA. Biden did not even need the time to ask Blinken. Blinken did not have the time to ask Austen. Biden just cut the USA’s contribution to UNRWA. Just like that. As if it had decided long beforehand so to do. And the USA got 17 other stupid countries, as if they had already committed to it previously by some SOFA (State of Armed Forces Agreement that the USA cooks up for such moments), to cut their funding literally within hours. They, too, did not take a split-second to discuss the matter. They did not even wonder if this might be the bit of evidence that is a nail in their coffin when they deny being “complicit with genocide”. Each of these subaltern States acted with a celerity not possible for such state bureaucracies. They cut the funds on the spot. Without an iota of proof, even.
“Let the Palestinians starve!” is the only possible interpretation of the USA’s decision, and that of its lackeys.
Israel has, until today, produced no evidence of its accusation against UNRWA. If there was evidence, they would have shown it by now – clear and bright on CNN and BBC and Deutsche Welle and France 24. We suppose there is none.
And in any case, so what? So what? So what if a mere 12 or so UNRWA employees of a grand total of 30,000 employees (repeat, thirty thousand UNRWA employees for the whole population of Palestinian refugees), were amongst those who participated in the massive prison break, out of the concentration camp that Gaza had been made into by the state-of-siege, that the incursion into Israel was? No-one in their right minds would cut funding for millions of refugee families just because a dozen people were somehow involved in unspecified crimes? What you do is you call for an investigation, and then get charges laid against the men you accuse of the crimes you have evidence they committed. That would be a civilized reaction.
But, when, on 7 October, Israel suffered its biggest ever military humiliation, all civilized rules went overboard.
Civilized rules are still overboard. Thus, the genocide.
When Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine wiped out the ultra-automated Israeli defense along the walls, they killed some 300 IDF soldiers of the Gaza division, a division that had been dominating the people of Gaza for 17 years including killing some 7,000 Gazans. The Palestinian resistance fighters, once the Israeli defenses were knocked out, also opened 40 different breaches in the Israeli wall and fencing. This way, they could accomplish their military aim of taking prisoners. At this point, however, the general public started to go through all 40 holes in the wall. Most of the public who went in, likely went in to see the land their grandfather and grandmother had been hounded off in 1948, making their families flee to refugee camps in Gaza where they have lived ever since.
But some Hamas and other fighters, or even gangs, killed civilians – 695 Israeli civilians were killed that day, according to the Israeli Social Security statistics.
Some of this number of 695 civilians, it has now come out in the Israeli press, were killed by the Israeli army, the IDF – from Apache helicopters firing hellfire missiles causing the deaths from severe burning of quite a few Israeli civilians that we all read about, and others were killed by shooting from tanks as the IDF took back control from the Hamas and other resistance fighters. The IDF’s killing of Israeli’s is part of the once-secret Hannibal Doctrine whereby the Israeli army calls on its soldiers to kill Israelis if necessary to prevent them being taken prisoner. The IDF killings have Israeli eye-witness accounts in the Israeli press.
However, there were still many civilians killed by Palestinian fighters, and this means war crimes were committed and need to be investigated.
It does not mean, for goodness sake, that the USA must continue to fund, to arm to the hilt, and to give geo-political backing to what is clearly genocide being perpetrated by Israel.
The “Treaty for the PREVENTION and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”, stipulated that States like the USA bear the responsibility of PREVENTING genocide. That means the Treaty obliges us all to call this genocide “genocide” BEFORE the ICJ decides if Israel is guilty or not of it. This is the only reasonable interpretation of how we could PREVENT genocide. The ICJ in its Provisional Order saw “plausible” genocide being perpetrated by Israel, and instructed Israel to stop its killing and maiming Palestinians and to stop its destroying the means of life of Palestinians. Israel has continued apace in its genocide. The ICJ in its Order also warned States like the USA that “complicity” with genocide constitutes the crime of genocide.
The stakes are that high.
The stakes are so high that the USA is getting scared of being found out.
Chuck Schumer, top Democrat Senator, has stood up and said Netanyahu is an obstacle to peace and must go. Though we notice that he added “once the war starts to wind down”. As if it were a “war” that, like a clock, could “wind down”, and not “genocide” being perpetrated with Chuck Shumer’s constant supply of armaments, money and vetoes. What a pathetic cover-up he attempts to do for his complicity.
US allies, too, are beginning to feel the heat of complicity with genocide. They don’t want to look silly and wait until the USA suddenly drops Israel, then, as if by magic, they also suddenly drop Israel, too, at the very same moment.
No wonder Canada has stopped supplying arms to Israel. No wonder Mr. Borell has announced that famine is already under way in Gaza, warning the European union not to be complicit. No wonder Lord Cameron has said Britain may recognize the State of Palestine before there is even an agreement from Israel. It is a case of “sauve qui peut” or “bur brit”.
Half the world’s people live in countries that call for an immediate ceasefire. And that have called for an immediate ceasefire for months, fearing genocide is underway and trying to prevent it.
Yet Israel and the USA press on – killing women, maiming children, starving little babies, bombing hospitals and universities and blocks of flats alike, exploding people’s houses in the West Bank as if it were a video-game, confiscating dead bodies, and then delivering containers full of decomposed bodies to Gaza, and all the while watching with apparent glee as epidemics spread, toddlers waste away and die and, with the other eye, watching the kilometer-long lines of trucks on TV, trucks full of life-saving supplies, blocked so cruelly by an Israeli State that has become so unhinged that its own soldiers get pleasure from holding up the supplies, even show themselves on Tik-Tok acting genocidal, singing and dancing, even fiddling with the underwear of people whose houses they have ransacked. No wonder the USA is banning Tik-Tok. This will hide some of the more maniacal behavior of the USA’s closest ally.
At the same time, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law advisor, has announced at a Harvard University Talk that the Palestinians could be moved to the Nagev Desert, but that “with diplomacy” they could negotiate with Egypt for Egypt to take them in, presumably in the Sinai as Israel intends to do. He also said the price of pied-dans-l’eau land on the Gaza coast “waterfront property can be very valuable.”
What a hideous spectacle. The Israelis, egged on by the Americans, show us the worst of humanity, and yet we fear they will show us worse still. Mark these words.
And meanwhile, the Palestinians in Gaza have shown us the best of humanity.
They have shown us five months of patience in suffering. They have shown us 17 years of patience in suffering. They have shown us resistance. They have given us proof of our humanity. Of human dignity. Of caring for the hurt. Of sharing with others a few cupfuls of animal feed to put into a pot of wild-plant soup to keep the wolf from the door. Old sayings like “to keep the wolf from the door” remind us: the pangs of hunger, the violent stomach cramps, are like a wolf eating at you. And eating, you know, at your child. The survivors of the heroic uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, an uprising against fascism, were haunted afterwards by the pangs of hunger more than anything else they suffered.
May we end this genocide in time to save the gentle people of Gaza and may we help them regain their health, strength and love-of-life, so they can rebuild their schools, their hospitals, their roads and bridges, their cafes and restaurants, their universities, their bakeries, and begin to re-plant their plantations of olive trees, even begin a new zoo for the pleasure of the children – to help them, their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, friends, comrades in arms, work colleagues, all Palestinians, surmount the trauma that has been visited upon them by Israel, with the arms and encouragement of the American state and armaments factories.
Lindsey Collen, for LALIT
