Days after South Africa filed a motion to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, the Biden administration responded with indignation. The allegation, White House spokesperson John Kirby declared, is “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”
South Africa’s 84-page submission is in fact exhaustive in its documentation of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza and Israeli leaders’ open intention to carry it out. By contrast to this detailed intervention, Israel’s chief sponsor in Washington openly admits that it still refuses even minimal scrutiny of the extermination campaign that it is funding and arming.
Nearly three months into an Israeli assault that has relied on billions of dollars in US weaponry, the Biden administration has still “conducted no formal assessment of whether Israel is violating international humanitarian law,” Politico reports. While going out of its way to avoid this assessment, the Biden administration has gone around Congressional review to transfer $147.5 million in artillery shells and other gear to Israel – the second time it has invoked emergency powers to do so.
A senior administration official insists to Politico that there is nothing to worry about: “If you just look at what Israel is doing, they aren’t systematically targeting civilians.” Even if that were true, which it clearly is not, what is indisputable is that Israel is systematically killing civilians. As even President Biden blurted out last month, Israel is carrying out “indiscriminate bombing,” an unambiguous war crime. For this reason, the New York Times reports, when Biden offered that “not… scripted comment,” his blunder “sent aides scrambling to explain.”
How the White House is now scrambling to explain its view that Israel is not committing genocide or even violations of humanitarian law is even more revealing. According to Politico: “The U.S. came to that conclusion in part after looking at press reports and conversations with Israeli officials about their military operations.” Absent from the Biden administration’s list of source material is its own intelligence, which recently found that almost half of the munitions that Israel has dropped on Gaza have been indiscriminate “dumb” bombs that have predictably murdered countless civilians in their homes and shelters.
Instead, the US is only relying on “press reports” – but clearly not those documented in South Africa’s ICJ submission, which collects Israeli leaders’ genocidal rhetoric in nine pages of chilling detail (p. 59-67). That leaves “conversations with Israeli officials” – who, unsurprisingly, are not keen to admit that they are the 21st century’s worst war criminals.
Israel’s bombing campaign is accompanied by an unprecedented blockade that deprives Gaza of vital aid. According to Arif Husain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, “80% of the people [globally], or four out of five people, in famine or a catastrophic type of hunger are in Gaza right now.”
At the White House podium, Kirby said that he is “not aware of any kind of formal assessment being done by the United States government to analyze the compliance with international law by our partner Israel.” And given that Kirby has previously stated that the White House has “no red lines” when it comes to Israel’s conduct, that will remain the case. “We have not seen anything that would convince us that we need to take a different approach in terms of trying to help Israel defend itself,” he said.
But just as the US is fully aware that its partner Israel is committing genocide, the US is also aware that Israel’s professed “right to self-defense” against occupied territory has nothing to do with self-defense. Biden administration officials have admitted as much to one of their most reliable media mouthpiece since Oct. 7th, the New York Times. “The Americans say Israel’s forceful response… reflects the importance that it places on re-establishing deterrence against attacks from adversaries in the region,” the Times reported in November. “The Israeli military’s aura of power was shaken by the Oct. 7 attack, the officials say.”
To restore Israel’s shaken “aura of power,” therefore, the empathetic Americans have given Israel a free pass to slaughter more than 22,000 defenseless civilians, all while pushing the two million survivors into famine and desperation.
This imperative of “deterrence” – establishing a monopoly on violence against occupied Palestinians and regional neighbors – has guided Israeli strategy since its inception.
As a divisional military commander in 1967, future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon voiced concern that Israel was losing its “deterrence capability,” which he defined as “our main weapon – the fear of us.”
In 1988, one month into the first Intifada, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted that his policy of brutalizing demonstrating Palestinians was successfully employing Israel’s main weapon of fear. “The use of force, including beatings, undoubtedly has brought about the impact we wanted—strengthening the population’s fear of the Israel Defense Forces,” Rabin said.
When Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, a three-week long assault that killed 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children, in the Gaza Strip, Israel wielded the same weapon. According the New York Times, Israeli officials were guided by a “larger concern”: that their “enemies are less afraid of it than they once were or should be.” Therefore, the Times reported, “Israeli leaders are calculating that a display of power in Gaza could fix that,” using slain Palestinians civilians to “re-establish Israeli deterrence.”
The same imperative applies to Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza. In calling for “a war of unprecedented magnitude” on Gaza, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explained in October that “Israel’s future depends not on pity from the world, but on fear in the hearts of our enemies.”
In a new account of the Biden administration’s dealings with Israel, the New York Times again confirms that Israel seeks to preserve its monopoly on state terror. In Gaza, the Times explains, “strategically, Israel does not mind too much if the rest of the world thinks it is willing to go overboard with overwhelming force.” After all, Israel has spent more than a “half century… fostering the image of invincibility, an image shattered on Oct. 7. Israeli leaders want to reestablish the deterrence that was lost.”
Israel indeed need not mind that the world opposes its genocidal campaign when the world’s top superpower gives it free rein to “go overboard with overwhelming force” – the Times’ artful euphemism for state terror.
The White House continues to make this endorsement clear, even as it occasionally feigns concern about the civilian toll. According to the Times, “there is no serious discussion within the Biden administration about cutting Israel off or putting conditions on security aid.” The only “real debate” concerns “the language to use and how hard to push,” on marginal tactical issues. But no matter how many more civilians die, “no one inside is really pressing for a dramatic policy shift like suspending weapons supplies to Israel — if for no other reason than they understand the president is not willing to do so.”
Israel undoubtedly appreciates Biden’s unwillingness to stop the genocide. As Israel’s former US ambassador Michael Oren explains, Israel was “dependent on the United States,” after Oct. 7th. “And that meant they have a say in things.” The White House’s main contribution, Oren adds, is that “Biden has not used the two most obvious tools available to him to force Israel’s hand, namely the flow of U.S. arms to Israel and the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council that protects Israel from international sanctions.” According to White House insiders, while Biden and Netanyahu “are not truly friends,” both “understand each other’s politics and their mutual dependence at this point.”
Biden and Netanyahu’s mutual dependence only means that Israel must occasionally temper its savagery to meet US public relations needs. According to Times, Netanyahu “agreed to let humanitarian aid into Gaza as a condition for Mr. Biden visiting” Israel after Oct. 7th. In other words, Netanyahu let a trickle of humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza death camp solely for the political benefit that a Biden visit could offer him. The Times offers this revelation in passing without further comment. In the view of the Times and its Biden administration sources, it is perfectly reasonable for Israel to block vital supplies to Gaza just to extract a gesture of US political support for its extermination campaign there.
In a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal, Netanyahu described his “three prerequisites for peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors in Gaza” as follows: “Hamas must be destroyed, Gaza must be demilitarized, and Palestinian society must be deradicalized.”
But Netanyahu’s vision of “peace” is predicated on exterminating his Palestinian neighbors in Gaza. Along with its bombing campaign and starvation siege, Israeli officials have openly called for ethnic cleansing. “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration,” Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israeli Army Radio. “If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not 2 million Arabs, the entire discussion on the day after will be totally different.” According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has informed cabinet members that: “Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.”
Any serious “prerequisite for peace” therefore requires the inverse of Netanyahu’s strategy: the Israeli government must be demilitarized and Israeli society must be deradicalized. The same applies for the Biden administration, which is so radicalized that it openly flaunts its support for what South Africa calls “the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza,” all to help defend Israel’s “aura of power.”
A recent poll in America found that by an overwhelming margin, far more Americans think that Hamas aims to genocide Israelis than think that Israelis aim to genocide Gazans. However, that finding is not surprising when one recognizes that the U.S. Government itself is a 50-50 partner with Israel’s Government in perpetrating this genocide; and, as I reported on December 8th, “Biden backs Israel’s policy to eliminate all Gazans” but that he constantly denies it by alleging that he is pressuring Netanyahu to discontinue doing it — even while it is the case that though Israel is supplying the troops to do it, the U.S. is supplying the weapons and the bombs and the missiles and the satellite intelligence that enables them to do it. This is a genocide that is being done by two means: Israel supplies the troops, and America supplies the intelligence and the weapons, to do it. Both are equally responsible for it.
Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Two hundred and forty-four American cargo planes and 20 ships have delivered over 10,000 tons of military equipment to Israel since October 7 to support the massacre in Gaza, Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Monday.
The US support has been crucial in Israel’s ability to keep up its relentless bombardment of Gaza. The Washington Post reported on December 9 that, up to that date, Israel dropped over 22,000 US-provided bombs on the Gaza Strip.
The Pentagon has refused to disclose what types of weapons it’s been sending to Israel, but media reports have revealed some details. The Wall Street Journal reported on December 1 that the US had shipped 15,000 bombs and 57,000 155mm artillery shells to Israel since October 7. …
US officials claim they are “concerned” about the massive civilian casualty rate in Gaza, but the Biden administration continues to provide unconditional military aid for the slaughter. A report from +972 Magazine revealed that Israel is intentionally targeting civilian areas as part of its war strategy.
Biden’s protestations of innocence in this genocide are just more lies from him. He is equally to blame for it along with Netanyahu.
Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope that the world is taking that first step.
American President Joe Biden likes to talk about “inflexion points” when he is lecturing about world affairs and the supposed superiority of the United States. This year is indeed an inflexion point.
It was the year that the entire world saw the truly hideous and criminal nature of U.S. power.
Washington’s fuelling of the futile conflict in Ukraine and the despicable slaughter in Gaza is a wake-up call for the entire world. The United States stands barefaced and grotesque as the primary purveyor of war. There can be no doubt about that. For many it is shocking, scandalous and frightening.
Tragically, it seems, for the world, every year’s end is an occasion to witness and lament conflicts, wars and suffering over the preceding 12 months. Often the causes of wars and suffering are seemingly unfathomable.
However, this year seems to be unique. The year ends with a horrendous massacre in Gaza that is unprecedented and perpetrated by Israel with the full support of the United States. The scale of deliberate mass killing in Gaza makes it a genocide. The fact that this abomination is occurring at Christmas time when the world is supposed to celebrate the divine birth of Jesus Christ – the Prince of Peace – in the very place where he was born some 2,000 years ago makes the abomination all the more profane and damning.
What is particularly wretched is that the heinous destruction of children is happening in full view of the world. There is no remorse or pretence. It is full-blown premeditated murder done with cruelty and sickening impunity.
Virtually the whole world is horrified by the devastating, relentless violence and absolute violation of international law. The butchery by the Israeli regime cannot in any way be rationalized by the previous attack on Israel by Palestinian militants on October 7. Those killings by Hamas have been cynically used as a pretext for the subsequent and ongoing annihilation of Palestinian civilians.
This genocide could not happen without the crucial support of the United States for the Israeli regime. Financially, militarily and diplomatically, Washington is sponsoring the horror in Gaza as well as the Occupied West Bank.
This week saw the U.S. once again obstructing calls at the United Nations for a ceasefire and the urgent supply of humanitarian aid to more than two million people. The World Food Program has declared a catastrophic famine in the coastal enclave after more than 70 days of bombing and blockade by the Israeli regime. More than 20,000 people – mainly women and children – have been slaughtered with up to 7,000 more missing, presumably dead. Israeli troops are carrying out mass executions of terrified and traumatized human beings, according to UN rights monitors.
The United States is arming Israel to the hilt and enabling it. U.S. President Joe Biden has pointedly refused to join international demands for a ceasefire. The United Nations has voted by an overwhelming majority for a cessation of the violence. Washington has repeatedly rejected the world’s pleas because the Biden administration is obscenely amplifying Israeli lies and distortions. “Unwavering, unshakable support” is how the White House arrogantly boasts about it without a hint of shame that it is self-indicting.
Tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions have been flown to Israel to carry out “indiscriminate bombing” (Biden’s own admission). One-tonne bunker-buster bombs have been dropped deliberately on refugee camps and hospitals. And still, the Pentagon shamelessly refuses to impose any red lines on the use of its munitions.
This genocide has Israeli fingers on the triggers but it is ultimately an American-sponsored genocide. Based on Nuremberg principles, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu would be both in the dock, accompanied by Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Lloyd Austin and their counterparts in Tel Aviv.
If there were previous international doubts about Washington’s systematic criminality, the whole world knows for certain now.
Significantly, too, American citizens are also repulsed by the barbarity and the fact that their government is an accomplice in a historic crime against humanity. Polls show that Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents ever, and his culpability for the genocide in Gaza is a primary reason for the widespread disgust, especially among younger Americans.
As things stand, there is a fair chance that 81-year-old incumbent Democrat will lose the presidential election in 2024 – less than 11 months away. Not that any of the Republican contenders are qualitatively better. American politics are in a crisis of chaos.
But this is not just about Biden or other individual U.S. politicians. The United States government and much of the corporate-controlled media stand full square behind Israel’s crimes. That has always been the case since the Israeli state was formed in 1948 through Washington’s skulduggery at the newly established United Nations, together with the old colonial power, Britain – the author of the infamous and treacherous Balfour Declaration that instigated Zionist dispossession of the indigenous people in the Holy Land, or what London called its Palestinian Mandate.
Decades of duplicity and dissembling as a peace broker in the Middle East have been blown away by the horrendous massacre that has culminated at the end of 2023. Israel is carrying out a Final Solution that is comparable to the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The Zionist regime has cynically used the Holocaust against Jews as a cover for its genocide against Palestinians. And many decent Jews around the world, including Holocaust survivors, are rightly mortified by the depraved association exploited by the Zionist regime.
What is happening in Gaza may be seen as a shocking revelation for the world of historic proportions. It is an eye-opener of the violence and lawlessness that the U.S. emperor has been systematically engaged in since it became the dominant world power almost a century ago. Following the Second World War and the defeat of European fascism – largely by the Soviet Union – the United States has taken up the fascist mantle, albeit unspoken and disguised with pretensions claims of democratic virtue. No other nation has waged as many wars and conflicts over the past eight decades as the U.S. The death toll from American imperialism runs to tens of millions of people with victims on every continent.
The conflict that erupted in Ukraine in February 2022 is another manifestation of Washington’s imperialist machinations. That war is approaching its third year and shows no sign of ending because the U.S. continues to weaponize the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, a regime that Washington and its European NATO allies installed in 2014 through a coup d’état. The hostilities in Ukraine – the biggest in Europe since the Second World War – were fomented by the United States as a proxy war to defeat Russia. The war could have been avoided if the U.S. and its European vassals had negotiated a diplomatic solution to NATO’s expansionist threat to Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did not want a war in Ukraine. Respected American commentators like John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Scott Ritter have all confirmed with extensive analysis that Washington and its European allies are primarily responsible for creating the conflict – one that has cost the lives of as many as 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and the displacement of 10 million civilians across Europe. Nearly $200 billion in Western public money has been wasted so far. Biden and the European Union want to donate another $100 billion to prolong this futile war.
America’s wars were always officially rationalized with some seeming plausible cause or mission. In the early decades of the Cold War, Washington claimed to be defending the “Free World” against Communist aggression in Korea, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America. When the Cold War supposedly ended in 1990-91 after the collapse of the Soviet Union due to its internal political problems, we then saw a spate of U.S. wars around the world against drugs, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and – most absurdly – defense of human rights.
The latest war in Ukraine is purportedly to defend democracy and sovereignty (of a Nazi Waffen SS-adulating regime in Kiev installed by the CIA!).
Nonetheless, the genocide in Gaza is the culmination, the final act. This is where all the history of U.S. crimes and fraudulence as a “noble exceptional democratic leader” finally comes unstuck.
It is an infernal climax for a global power, arguably the world’s first and last imperialist global hegemon. The whole of humanity can now see that all the American rhetoric and vanity is nothing but an ugly lie. The emperor is naked in all his crimes. The blood of children on his hands, his mouth drooling with lies. It was always so, but now universally evident.
One might ask, where do we go from here? Despite the abominable cruelty, suffering and misery, one can still hope that humanity will eventually find a way to live in peaceful coexistence. By respecting all those who abide by international law and basic moral precepts. Arguably, most of humanity is willing and capable of living in peace.
But to achieve that peace there must be no illusions and lies. There must be accountability and genuine atonement.
U.S. imperial power is damned. There’s no going back or reform. The capitalist economic system – evolved as oligarchic fascism and its two-party puppet show – driving imperialist barbarism must be called out and overturned. Biden is doomed, and Trump and so on are just more false prophets.
Seeing the naked truth is usually the first step before we can go on to realize the truth of beauty and decency. We might hope – for the sake of peace and ending much of the suffering – that the world is taking that first step.
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.
All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.
“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.
Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”
Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.
The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.
Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.
The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.
As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Infectious diseases brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.
The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.
Israel is a pariah state. This was publically on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.
Evidence is mounting that Israel is firing shells that disperse illegal white phosphorus on targets — a gruesome weapon supplied to Israel by and manufactured in the US, and which the US has, in contravention to a UN ban, itself used in Syria, Iraq and other conflicts.
White phosphorus or WP is widely opposed as a weapon of war because the phosphorus, put on small bits of felt released and scattered from the air from a burst cannon shell, grenade or bomb, ignites on contact with atmospheric oxygen and burns at a very high temperature. On contacting human flesh it burns straight down through skin and muscle to the bone, is terribly painful, and can cause painful death or lasting injuries.
Israel was caught having used the weapon in southern Lebanon on Oct. 16, as reported in the Washington Post, in an attack that burned several homes and at least nine civilians when Israel’s military responded to shelling by Hezbollah. The Israeli military initially denied using the weapon, but spent shell casings identifying them as white phosphorus shells and with markings showing they were made by US arms makers, discovered by a Post reporter on the ground there, were unmistakable. So was the obvious Israeli lie that the phosphorus weapon was only used to create a smoke screen to protect Israeli troops (who in truth were not in Lebanon!).
Israel has also been charged with using white phosphorus in its two-month massive attack on Gaza, in particular over crowded parts of Northern Gaza (see photo which shows the characteristic burning trails of phosphorus falling from an opened shell in mid-air, a familiar image from the US invasion of Iraq in 2003-4).
Meanwhile, the fact-check outfit Snopes has issued a damning report by investigative reporter Alex Kasprak that concludes that while the evidence may not provide absolute confirmation regarding white phosphorus shell use in Gaza, the available photos and videos “are strong evidence in support of that conclusion.”
The use of white phosphorus as a weapon in the Gaza War is particularly horrific because most Palestinians there have no shelter. The concrete buildings they had lived in might have helped protect them, but have largely been destroyed thanks to Israel’s carpet-bombing and shelling of their homes and apartment buildings. Now much of the Gaza population lives on the streets, sleeping on sidewalks or empty lots, and is completely exposed to contact with any falling white phosphorus —- this at a time when hospitals are no longer functioning anywhere in Gaza.
When accused of using white phosphorus in Iraq, particularly on occasions like the total destruction of Fallujah in a 2004 revenge attack that Israel might well be using as a model for its much larger current attack on Gaza, the Pentagon and Bush administration lied by claiming the phosphorus weapon was only being used to “light up the area,” not to kill troops or civilians. But that lie was exposed by the weapon’s results: the many civilians horribly burned or killed by white phosphorus — and also by the photos taken in daytime showing the distinctive white smoke trails coming down from the air against a bright blue sky when no artificial light was required.
It all amounts to one more charge of war crimes against Israel (and the US) in addition to the major war crime of launching a war of collective punishment and revenge upon the 2.3 million captive and suffering residents of Gaza by the Israeli government and military that is charged with assuring their well-being in a captive territory from which they cannot leave at will and which is dependent upon Israel for currently barred food, water, electricity and access to medical supplies.
Already, the IDF war on Gaza—when one factors in all the missing and now dead victims buried under buildings collapsed over the past nine weeks by Israel’s record bombing campaign— has claimed the lives off over one-percent of the Palestinian population trapped in the fenced-in and walled-off territory. And the IDF’s brutal one-sided campaign, now in its eighth week, continues full force, with the US, the supplier of the ammunition, including white phosphorus 155-millimeter cannon rounds, refusing to pull the plug and demand a cease fire.
Obviously most of the known 18,000 Palestinian deaths and the thousands of unknown deaths from building collapses have been killed by “ordinary” bombs and explosive howitzer and tank shells or gunfire, But while white phosphorus attacks may not be adding that many victims to that list, relatively speaking, it speaks to the viciousness of the Israeli military that has chosen to use this weapon, as well as of the US military for keeping such bombs and shells in its inventory and supplying them to such a racist, apartheid state. (As for the US, where’s the surprise in learning that the nation that invented “stickier’ napalm, not to mention atomic bombs, doesn’t just use white phosphorus weapons, but like a oxycontin dealer trying to support his own habit is pushing them on other countries.)
Nixon and Kissinger had their wretched, criminal Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam by B-52 bombers over three decades ago in 1972. Netanyahu, Biden and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken are now having their own Chanukah Bombing, which, if the US-backed Iraeli blitz continues for another two weeks will be a Christmas Bombing 2.0.
In a private forum I’m a member of, the topic of Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza—dubbed “Operation Swords of Iron”—has been under discussion, and, regrettably, I have found myself in the position of being a lone voice speaking out against attempts to justify Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by which the “Jewish state” came into existence, and Israel’s systematic violation of the fundamental human rights of the Palestinians ever since.
Since this group includes individuals who exercise public influence, I’ve been viewing it is as my duty to exercise my own influence within the group by speaking out and setting the record straight both in terms of the history of the conflict and with respect to what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for the horrific atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7.
Since I’ve put the time into addressing numerous arguments there, I figure I might as well make the most use of that labor by publishing some of what I wrote here.
In particular, I want to provide my readers with an update about the horrific situation on the ground in Gaza, which I wrote for the purpose of posting to the discussion thread in response to someone who questioned my assertion that civilians are being massacred. In my response, I also pointed out that Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza is being carried out with openly genocidal intent.
Before I get to that, though, I’ll provide some of the context of what happened prior to that in the discussion.
Defending Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
My participation in this particular discussion thread was prompted by one participant putting forth an argument attempting to defend of Israel’s war crimes. His view was that Israel must continue its military operations in Gaza until Hamas has been completely eliminated. This is essentially the same argument that I debated the negative to on The Tom Woods Show last month, my rebuttal being summarized in the statement, “So, no, Israel does not have a ‘right’, much less a ‘moral duty’, to commit war crimes in Gaza”.
So, I responded in the forum thread with an explanation for why Israel’s devastating indiscriminate bombardment is absolutely indefensible. After a few rounds of this, my interlocutor ended by incongruously admonishing me to join him in working towards peace, to which I responded by pointing out that I was the one literally advocating a humanitarian ceasefire while his whole argument was literally that Israel must continue its violence against the Palestinians in Gaza.
I won’t repeat all the points and counterpoints that were made because it was too lengthy an argument and too difficult to try to summarize, but one argument this individual made was that he and I just don’t agree on the distinction between legitimate self-defense and war crimes. My response to that was to say I doubt that very much, unless he simply rejected international humanitarian law. That Israel has committed massive war crimes is beyond dispute, as I’ll come to.
The Zionist Trope that Occupation Is Good for Palestinians
Journo in his book had made the same claim that the Palestinians benefited economically because of Israel’s occupation. I cited a World Bank report detailing rather how economic growth had occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territories despite Israel’s economically repressive occupation. As the World Bank pointed out, for sustainable development to occur and for the Palestinian territories to reach their full economic potential, Israel’s occupation must end.
I won’t paste the whole excerpt from that section of my book here, but here are the final several paragraphs I wrote after detailing at length the myriad ways documented by the World Bank in which Israel’s occupation was harming Palestinians’ economy, with reference to the “broken window” fallacy in economics of failing to recognize opportunity costs:
Journo commits the same fallacy, highlighting the economic development that occurred in the occupied territories in the 1970s while ignoring the opportunity cost inherent in the occupation. That is to say, he ignores how the Palestinian economy would otherwise have been able to grow sustainably and at an even greater pace if they’d just enjoyed the freedom necessary for such growth to occur, to be able to live up to their full economic potential, as opposed to suffering under Israel’s oppressive and restrictive occupation regime.
Israel didn’t create the conditions for economic growth to occur. Rather, Israel calculatedly hindered economic growth in such a way as to make the Palestinians dependent upon their occupier, thus suppressing resistance so that Israel’s illegal land-grabbing settlement regime could continue apace, while taking advantage of the cheap labor provided by Palestinian commuters whose alternative employment opportunities were denied to them as a consequence of the restrictions on their freedom imposed by the occupation regime.
Journo’s presumption that the Palestinians ought to have been grateful to Israel for imposing its occupation regime on them is a stark illustration of his contempt for their right to self-determination, as well as his extraordinary hypocrisy in feigning to approach the subject from the premise that the right to individual liberty is inviolable.
By the time we come to the year 1987 and the mass uprising against the occupation known as the first intifada, Arabic for “throwing off”, we are supposed to be awed by Israel’s greatness and horrified by the Palestinians’ innate backwardness and inexplicable hatred of Jews. We are not supposed to be able to comprehend how Palestinians would wish for an end to Israel’s rule over them.
But setting aside Journo’s fiction and considering the actual nature of the occupation regime, the Palestinians’ desire for freedom is the simplest thing to understand. Their yearning for liberty, to be able to have a say in how they are governed, to determine their own fate and live up to their full potential, is a trait shared by all human beings. Evidently, Journo views them as something less, rejecting their human rights and projecting upon them his own hateful prejudice and inhumanity.
The Biblical Defense the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Another participant then posted a timeline and meme that together implicitly argued that because there was a 300-year period in ancient history during which a kingdom called Israel existed, therefore Zionist Jews in 1948 had a right to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants.
I have a forthcoming article addressing this type of religious argument so won’t repeat my counterargument here except to point out that Jews actually owned less than 7% of the land in Palestine at the time the Zionist leadership unilaterally and with no legal authority declared the existence of their “Jewish state” on land in which Arabs were both the majority and owned most of the land.
I discussed the early history of the conflict at considerable length recently with economist Saifedean Ammous, author of The Bitcoin Standard and other books, who is Palestinian and grew up in the West Bank, as he mentions during our discussion.
The Zionist Trope that Criticism of Israel Is “Anti-Semitism”
After posting my response to the religious argument, the person who posted the timeline and meme baselessly and absurdly accused me of “anti-Semitic slurs” that were “fomenting hate that is leading to violence” while not even attempting to identify anything I’d said that wasn’t true or any conclusions I’d drawn that didn’t logically follow from the facts. After pointing out that this type of baseless personal attack is the height of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice, I further observed:
I remind you also that I am the one advocating an end to hostilities and peaceful co-existence based on mutual respect for the equal rights of Jews and Palestinians, while you are the one trying to defend Israel’s systematic violation of the rights of the Palestinians—and Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza—by mindlessly equating legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government with “anti-Semitism”.
Additionally, the Introduction to my book was written by former economics editor of Barron’s Gene Epstein, who is also Jewish, and who wrote his Introduction specifically to preempt the intellectually dishonest equation of criticizing Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians with anti-Semitism.
I also quoted blurbs written for the book by famed intellectual Noam Chomsky and journalist Max Blumenthal, both also Jewish.
In the thread, I pasted Gene’s entire Introduction, which I won’t do here, but here’s the most relevant excerpt in the context of the “anti-Semite” accusation leveled at me:
In Hammond’s case, people who would benefit most from reading his book will put up a wall of resistance against the simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense he offers.
I know, because over the years I’ve spoken with many of these people. Their identity as Jews and as Americans—or identification with Jews or with Americans—seems to depend on a certain false narrative that is difficult for them to abandon. The falsity can often be demonstrated, as Hammond shows, not by citing sources critical of Israel, but by citing journalists, historians, and politicians who are themselves Jews, Zionists, or Israelis—a fact that, perhaps perversely, makes me proud of being a Jew. We are a candid people, who tell it like it is.
I found Obstacle to Peace quite convincing, but my pride in being Jewish and American, and my identification with many Israelis, remains intact. That should not be a difficult feat. . . . My pride in being Jewish is not diminished by knowledge of these facts, just as my contempt for Jew-haters is not diminished when they cite the crimes of Israel to justify their anti-Semitism.
People have told me that I “don’t support Israel” because of my views. They might as well level that accusation against the Israeli Peace Now movement, Shalom Achshav, established in 1978, and its sister organization, Americans for Peace Now. Those who subscribe to the mythic version of events are in effect condemning Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent state of war. With supporters like that, neither side may need antagonists.
RFK Jr.’s Defense of Israel’s Crimes Against the Palestinians
Next, the person who stupidly accused me of anti-Semitism shared the link to a video in which presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. once again tried to defend Israel’s military operation as well as its 16-year illegal blockade of Gaza, which prompted me to write the article I published yesterday, “Correcting RFK Jr on Israel’s Policies Toward Gaza“, which I then shared with the group.
To see Mr. Kennedy supporting Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinians’ human rights is heartbreaking to me. As someone who has become a prominent voice within the health freedom community, I have had the pleasure of becoming acquainted with Mr. Kennedy, whom I had come to have the utmost respect for his incredible leadership in fighting the Covid lockdown madness and the government’s systematic violation of the right to informed consent. I have also been impressed by his sensible views on US foreign policy, such as on the Ukraine war. We have corresponded on many occasions, including phone conversations, and he wrote the Foreword to my book The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board.
I usually do not vote because there are no candidates worth voting for and I have no intention of legitimizing my own disenfranchisement by participating in the system that infringes on my personal liberties and steals from me, or legitimizing the violations of human rights of people in other countries as a result of US foreign policy. The only candidate I have ever voted for was Ron Paul, in 2008 and again as a write-in in 2012. But when Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy earlier this year, I became an enthusiastic supporter.
It was with great regret that, after watching him defending Israel’s war crimes in Gaza after Hamas’s 10/7 attacks, I was compelled by my moral conscience to also publicly withdraw my support for his candidacy. It is simply not within me to be able to support any candidate who is willing to try to defend clear war crimes and crimes against humanity, any more than I could support a candidate who supported the authoritarian COVID-19 lockdowns and their coerced mass vaccination endgame.
I waited for several weeks before making my view public because I was holding out hope that I might see signs that he was coming around, that he might moderate his position from one of essentially repeating standard Zionist propaganda talking points intended to justify Israel’s criminal policies to one of respecting the equal rights of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Unfortunately, after seeing no such indications and rather watching him once again defend Israel’s war crimes while refusing to join those calling for a humanitarian ceasefire, I could wait no longer and issued my statement (first to my subscriber community, then published on my website).
I remain heartbroken, but I have no choice but to follow my conscience.
Civilians Are Being Massacred? Yes.
After posting the link to that article correcting Mr. Kennedy’s numerous false characterizations of the nature of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, I received a rebuke from yet another member of the discussion forum. I was told that I do not have some moral imperative to correct him, that I lacked integrity for “attacking” and “belittling” him, and that I should instead have the intellectual integrity to agree to disagree.
I responded by expressing my continued love for Mr. Kennedy and saying, “I stand by what I wrote. And, yes, I do have a moral imperative to speak out. I do not ‘agree to disagree’ when civilians are being massacred.”
Yet another member of the group then responded to ask, “Civilians are being massacred?”
I do not know whether the question was sincerely asked because this person really has not been paying attention to what’s been happening in Gaza or because she was implicitly trying to challenge me because she believed the ludicrous Zionist propaganda claim that Israel is “the most moral army in the world” and does everything possible to avoid harm to civilians.
That is a claim that I thoroughly and utterly demolish in my book Obstacle to Peace and also addressed briefly but sufficiently in my article setting the record straight in response to Kennedy’s mischaracterizations of the nature of Israel’s policies toward Gaza.
Whatever the intent behind the question, here was my response:
Yes, civilians are being massacred. The death estimate as of yesterday was over 17,177, about 30% of whom are women and 40% children. More Palestinian children were killed in just the first [three] weeks of Israel’s onslaught than in all of the other conflict zones in the world combined for each of the years 2020, 2021, and 2022.
As of November 24, 50% of the housing stock in Gaza had been damaged and 10% completely destroyed. Israel has systematically targeted civilian infrastructure including power systems, water supplies, bakeries, hospitals, and schools, including UN-run schools where displaced civilians have sought shelter. The devastation has of course increased greatly in the two weeks since.
Early in its operations, the IDF ordered the entire northern half of Gaza to evacuate and go south while also bombing the south. It has since ordered the entire population of Gaza, over 2 million people, to a coastal area, to borrow scholar Norman Finkelstein’s comparison, about the size of the Los Angeles airport. The destruction that the IDF wrought on the north is now being done to the south. Palestinians are being told to flee, but they have nowhere safe to go.
Nearly 85% of the population is now displaced. The shelters are overrun. Gaza remains under an electricity blackout. There is a grave lack of fuel to run generators. The over-capacity health care system is collapsing, with only 14 of 36 hospitals in Gaza even partially functioning, only 2 in the north. The WHO has documented over 200 attacks on health care, including 24 hospitals and 59 ambulances. Humanitarian aid operations that the civilian population is absolutely dependent on for survival have virtually halted because of the serious danger to relief workers, with 130 UN relief workers already having been killed.
This is a humanitarian catastrophe of absolutely horrific proportions. The UN Secretary General has invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter, bringing to the Security Council’s attention the grave threat to international peace and security posed by the situation, an effort to push the Council to call for the urgently needed permanent ceasefire—not a “pause” in hostilities—that UN humanitarian agencies and international human rights organizations have been calling for to save Palestinian civilians from dying in massive numbers, but which efforts have been blocked by the US.
Moreover, Israel’s military operation is being conducted with openly genocidal intent.
Netanyahu invoked the fabled Israelite genocide of the Amalekites and declared the goal of turning Gaza into rubble.
The Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared that Israel would block the supply of electricity, food, water, and fuel to the civilian population because the IDF was “fighting human animals”. “Gaza won’t return to what it was before,” he also said. “We will eliminate everything.”
The IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the [Occupied] Territories (COGAT) echoed that “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
The IDF’s spokesperson Daniel Hagari prior to Israel’s ground invasion said with regard to Israel’s bombardment that “the emphasis is on damage and not accuracy”.
Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old Israeli military veteran who was involved in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, rallied IDF soldiers to “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.”
Not content to massacre the civilian population of Gaza, he further called on Israeli Jews to kill Arab Israelis: “Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar on BBC Arabic objected to the description of Palestinians as “human animals”, saying “I do not equate them with animals because that is an insult to animals.”
On Twitter, Israeli politician and former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin called on the IDF to “completely destroy Gaza”, “I mean destruction like it was in Dresden and Hiroshima”.
“Gaza needs to turn to Dresden, yes!” he repeated in another tweet. “Complete incineration. No more hope. . . . Annihilate Gaza now! Now!”
Knesset member Galit Distel-Atbaryan took to Twitter to tell people to “Hate the monsters” and “Invest this energy in one thing; Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth. That the Gazan monsters will fly to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory, or they will die…. Gaza should be erased.”
Former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland, who during his tenure in 2004 appropriately described Gaza as “a huge concentration camp”, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that “Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in. . . . Every building will be a military target.” Gazans must be told to “evacuate to the UNRWA schools and the Shifa Hospital, and immediately after that the Air Force will attack these targets”. It was not enough to stop the flow of electricity, fuel, and water; the IDF must “gradually attack targets that provide these essential needs, and if necessary also to block with fire any vehicle passage from the city of Rafah to the north. Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.”
In another article, Eiland wrote that “Israel issued a stern warning to Egypt and made it clear that it would not permit humanitarian aid from Egypt to enter Gaza. Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, compelling tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf.” The goal of the IDF’s operation is that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”.
Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and director of the genocide studies program at Stockton University has described what has been happening in Gaza “a textbook case of genocide”. The organization Jewish Voice for Peace has called on the world community to demand a ceasefire to protect the Palestinian people against genocide. 880 legal scholars and academics in conflict studies and genocide studies issued a statement on October 15 warning of potential genocide, observing that Israeli official’s incitement of genocide was being followed up with Israel’s indiscriminate bombing. The Center for Constitutional Rights three days later issued a briefing paper describing Israel’s crime of genocide and the US government’s complicity in it. On October 19, seven UN Special Rapporteurs issued a statement decrying the bombing of hospitals and schools and called on the world community to act to prevent genocide.
So, yes, to answer the question again, civilians are being massacred in Gaza, with openly declared genocidal intent.
I then added that this is what other group members were trying to defend, and this is what Mr. Kennedy has been also trying to defend. In doing so, I must regrettably say, he is completely discrediting himself as a defender of children and human rights. My heart is broken, and my soul is weeping. It is unconscionable. And I cannot in good conscience remain silent about it.
Evidence is emerging that establishes the fact that Zionist forces killed their own people on October 7. Zionist propaganda (also known as Hasbara) has suggested that Palestinian resistance forces were responsible for their deaths, but the narrative doesn’t add up.
Since the launch of the Al-Aqsa Storm (Al-Aqsa Flood) operation five weeks ago, the Zionist entity and its global agents, assets and supporters have maintained that the Palestinian resistance factions – which they condense inaccurately into the name ‘Hamas’ – have engaged in direct targeting of civilians, including children and babies.
Very early on, there was a widely reported claim that up to 40 babies had been beheaded by “Hamas”. Even US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders fell for the hoax.
The claim has now been debunked. It was backed by no evidence and was sourced from settler and occupation military reservist David Ben Zion, who has previously incited violent riots against Palestinians and called for the occupied West Bank town of Huwara to be wiped out.
Emerging details from Oct. 7
In the ensuing weeks, a flurry of details emerged bringing other elements of the official Zionist narrative into question.
These details came from a combination of body camera and mobile phone footage of participants, eyewitnesses, captives released by the resistance, and media reporting and video material. The details include:
First, in the compilation of deaths published and continually updated by Haaretz, a “liberal” Zionist paper, only one child under the age of 4 was listed as having died. The data also discloses that 16 children between 4 and 17 were among the casualties. This clearly demonstrates that the story about the beheading of 40 babies was false. The data does not reveal anything about babies or children being killed.
Second, the data compiled by Haaretz up until 7 November showed that 374 out of 1145, or 33 percent, were Israeli military personnel, including a small number of Kibbutz security personnel, but not including fire and rescue services.
Third, footage emerged of occupation forces engaging resistance fighters from within crowds of festivalgoers. It suggested that many died in the crossfire.
Indeed, fourth, one British citizen, who was at the festival, and also a member of the occupation forces, reportedly died after throwing grenades (reportedly back) at resistance fighters. He, like many other young British Jews, had evidently been radicalised by the Zionist movement to the extent that he was willing to become a member of the occupation forces.
Fifth, it was reported from inside Gaza that some 50 detainees had died from Zionist indiscriminate bombing while being held by the resistance forces.
The most shocking details, however, were reports of Zionist responsibility for the deaths of significant numbers of civilian detainees and festival attendees.
Music festival mystery
First, it emerged that the scene of burnt-out and shot-up cars outside the music festival was the result not of the actions of “Hamas” but of gunfire from occupation forces on the ground or from Apache attack helicopters in the air.
Footage of festival goers running from the venue on foot appears to corroborate evidence that it was impossible to evacuate by car since Zionist police had blocked the only road out and, in some cases at least, fired on those approaching.
Danielle Rachiel described nearly being killed after escaping from the Nova music festival: “As we reached the roundabout [at a kibbutz], we saw Israeli security forces!” he recalled.
“We held our heads down [because] we automatically knew they’d be suspicious of us, in a small beat-up car… from the same direction the terrorists were coming from. Our forces began shooting at us! … our windows shattered”.
It was only when they shouted in Hebrew, “We’re Israelis!” that the shooting stopped.
As one helicopter pilot confessed: “There was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian”.
In total, there were reportedly “28 combat helicopters” firing “over the course of” the day. They reportedly emptied “all the ammunition in their bellies”, then repeatedly re-armed firing in the end “hundreds of 30 mm cannon shells … as well as the Hellfire missiles.”
According to reports in the Hebrew language press “The rate of fire … was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.”
However, at one point, “Apache pilots [decided] to skip all the restrictions. It was only around 9:00 a.m. that some of them began to spray the terrorists with the cannons on their own, without authorization from superiors.”
Most (perhaps all or nearly all?) happened as a result of occupation forces’ actions. It is not known if this accounts for a few, most or nearly all of the reported 260 civilian casualties from the festival.
Second was the account of Yasmin Porat who had attended the music festival but fled to Kibbutz Be’eri. She declared in an interview on Israeli radio that the Israeli military had not distinguished between detainees and resistance fighters.
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she said. This would appear to involve the death of at least 12 captives, including her partner, apparently by gunfire.
Even more damning was the report from a settler who was away from Kibbutz Be’eri during the events.
The witness stated that the occupation fired tank shells at houses with all their occupants:
“His voice trembles when his partner, who was besieged in her home shelter at the time, comes to mind. According to him, only on Monday night and only after the commanders in the field made difficult decisions — including shelling houses with all their occupants inside to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages — did the IDF (Israeli military) complete the takeover of the kibbutz,” he said.
“The price was terrible: at least 112 Be’eri people were killed. Others were kidnapped. Yesterday, 11 days after the massacre, the bodies of a mother and her son were discovered in one of the destroyed houses. It is believed that more bodies are still lying in the rubble.”
Rubble of buildings and photographs
Given the fact that resistance fighters were lightly armed, the evidence of buildings reduced to rubble and burnt corpses and houses would appear to suggest Zionist forces were directly responsible for it.
The same is relevant with three photographs, two purporting to show the burnt corpse of a baby and one a bloodied but unburnt dead baby, and with the allegation of Hamas “roasting” a baby in an oven.
In the former case, we are already aware that one baby (not three) was listed among the dead. The photographs were spread all over social media including by the @IsraeliPM X (formerly Twitter) account (which garnered more than 6 million views) and one of them by pro-Israel extremist Ben Shapiro.
This latter image allegedly turned out to be an Artificial intelligence-generated image using a source image of a small dog, though this was later disputed.
The latter case – of the baby in the oven – would also appear to lack confirmation.
However, if either were genuine, the most obvious explanation for all of the accounts of burnt babies is that the infants were killed by incineration after occupation force strikes on the residential houses where they lived.
Hannibal Directive
Killing captives would appear to be in line with the little-known Zionist military doctrine known as the Hannibal Directive. Though disputed by some, it appears plausible the doctrine was named after the Carthaginian general, who chose to poison himself rather than fall captive to the Romans.
Created in 1986, and originally called the Hannibal Protocol, it posits as an overriding objective the need to avoid the capture of Zionist forces, if necessary, at the expense of eliminating their own forces. It remained a military secret until 2003.
During Israel’s ground attack on Gaza, in 2011, one Golani commander was caught on tape telling his unit: “No soldier in the 51st Battalion will be kidnapped, at any price or under any condition. … Even if it means that his unit will now have to fire at the getaway car.”
Later the occupation forces Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, modified the directive. Introducing what is described as an “ethical” principle known as the “double-effect doctrine”.
It states that a bad result (the killing of a captive soldier) is morally permissible only as a side effect of promoting a good action (stopping his captors).”
This bears a striking similarity to what happened on October 7th. Zionist lies are collapsing before our eyes.
On September 22, 2023, 16 days before the attack by the Palestinian Resistance, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the United Nations in New York. He brandished a map of the “New Middle East” on which Israel had absorbed the Palestinian Territories.
We are reacting to the attack on Israel on October 7 and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on the basis of the information available to us. However, we feel that the official version of the Israeli government and Hamas is a lie.
Seven major questions remain unanswered:
1. How did Hamas manage to dig and build 500 kilometers of tunnels at a depth of 30 meters without arousing suspicion?
Tunnel-drilling equipment is considered to have both civilian and military uses. It is not manufactured in Gaza and cannot be brought in under any circumstances, unless there is complicity within the Israeli administration.
The excavated earth (1 million m3) was not detected by aerial surveillance. Even supposing it had been scattered in many different places and mixed in with the soil from other construction sites, it is impossible for the Israeli intelligence services not to have detected anything for twenty years.
Tunnel ventilation equipment is not considered to be for military use. It is possible to bring it into Gaza, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.
The reinforced concrete needed to solidify the walls is not manufactured in Gaza. It too is not considered military equipment, but the quantity required should have attracted attention.
2. How could Hamas stockpile such an arsenal?
Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has large quantities of rockets and handguns at its disposal. Hamas may have manufactured parts of the rockets itself, but it has managed to import thousands of handguns into Gaza, mainly from the Ukraine, despite high-performance scanners. This seems impossible without complicity within the Israeli administration.
3. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed all those who warned him?
Egypt’s Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, personally phoned him to warn of a major Hamas attack.
His friend, Colonel Yigal Carmon, Director of Memri, personally warned him of a major Hamas attack.
The CIA sent Israel two intelligence reports warning of a major Hamas attack.
Defense Minister Yoav Galland was fired in July because he warned the government of the “perfect storm” prepared by Hamas.
4. Why did Benjamin Netanyahu demobilize the security forces on the evening of October 6?
The Prime Minister had authorized the Security Forces to stand down for the holidays of Sim’hat Torah and Shemini Atzeret. At the time of the attack, therefore, there were no personnel available to monitor the security fence around Gaza.
5. Why did security officials remain locked up at Shin Bet headquarters that morning?
The Director of Counterintelligence (Shin Bet), Ronen Bar, had called a meeting of the heads of all the security services for 8 a.m. on October 7, to examine the second CIA report warning of a major Hamas operation in preparation.
However, the attack began at 6.30 a.m. on the same day. Security officials didn’t react until 11am. What did they do during this interminable meeting?
6. Who triggered the “Hannibal directive” in this way, and why?
When the Security Forces began to react, the IDF was ordered to apply the “Hannibal directive”. This stipulates that enemies must not be allowed to take Israeli soldiers hostage, even if it means killing them. An Israeli police investigation confirms that the Israeli air force bombed the crowd fleeing the Supernova Rave Party. A significant proportion of those killed on October 7 were therefore not victims of Hamas, but of Israeli strategy.
In theory, the “Hannibal directive” only applies to soldiers. Who decided to bomb a crowd of Israeli civilians, and why? It is not possible today to determine with any certainty which Israelis were killed by the attackers and which were killed by their own army.
7. Why are Western forces threatening Israel?
The Pentagon has deployed two naval groups, around the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Eisenhower, and a cruise missile submarine, the USS Florida. Haaretz even mentioned a third aircraft carrier. America’s allies (Saudi Arabia, Canada, Spain, France, Italy) have installed fighter-bombers in the region.
These forces are not installed to threaten Turkey, Qatar or Iran, which the Western press accuses of being involved in the Hamas attack, but off the coast of Israel, in Beirut and Hamat. They are encircling Israel. And Israel alone.
WHAT LIES BEHIND THESE MYSTERIES?
Obviously the version defended by both Hamas and Israel is false. We must consider other possible explanations so as not to be manipulated by either one or the other.
Let’s formulate a hypothesis. There is nothing to say whether it is the correct one, but it is compatible with the factual elements, which is not the case with the version shared today by everyone. So it’s better than that one. It is obviously extremely shocking, but only those who are able to answer the previous 7 questions can dismiss it.
This interpretation is based on an analysis of the complex structure of Hamas, whose rank-and-file fighters are unaware of what their leaders are up to. There it is :
The entire operation of Hamas and Israel is led by Americans, perhaps under the direction of the Straussian Eliott Abrams [1] and his Vandenberg Coalition (Think Tank which succeeded the Project for a New American Century). The Muslim Brotherhood and the Revisionist Zionists, who apparently are waging a cruel war, are in reality accomplices at the expense of the rank-and-file Hamas fighters, the Palestinian people and Israeli soldiers. Here is their plan: Hamas is presented as the only effective resistance force to the oppression of the Palestinians, but it lets Israel liquidate the hope of a Palestinian state, while the Muslim Brotherhood, crowned with the sacrifice of the Palestinians, takes power in the Arab world.
The heads of Hamas’s military and political branches are both subordinate to the Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, the successor to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, yet nobody talks about him. From his point of view, the Brotherhood will be the big winner of the “Flood of Al-Aqsa”, even if Gaza is razed to the ground and the Palestinians driven from their land.
Hamas is now divided into two factions. The first, under the leadership of Ismaël Haniyeh, follows the Brotherhood’s line. It seeks neither to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation, nor to found a Palestinian state, but is dedicated to building a Caliphate over all the countries of the Middle East. The second, under the leadership of Khalil Hayya, has abandoned the Brotherhood’s ideology, and is fighting to put an end to the oppression of the Palestinian people by the Israelis.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a political secret society, organized by British intelligence services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [2]. It was gradually taken over by the CIA to the point of being represented on the US National Security Council. After the collapse of the Islamist regimes of the Arab Spring, the Brotherhood fractured into two trends. The London Front, led by Guide Ibrahim Munir (who died a year ago), proposed a way out of the crisis by leaving the political arena and securing the release of prisoners in Egypt. The Istanbul Front, led by interim leader Mahmoud Hussein, advocates, on the contrary, changing nothing and continuing the struggle to establish a Caliphate. A third group is attempting to establish an intermediate position, putting forward the idea of abandoning politics until the prisoners have been released, only to return to it at a later date.
The Muslim Brotherhood is fighting to seize power in all Arab states, as it did in Egypt in 2012-13. It should be remembered that, contrary to widespread opinion in the West, Mohamed Morsi was never democratically elected President of Egypt; that was General Ahmed Chafik. However, after the Brotherhood threatened to kill members of the Electoral Commission and their families, the latter, after 13 days of resistance, declared Morsi elected, despite the results of the ballot box. Subsequently, in 2013, 40 million Egyptians marched against him, calling on the army to deliver them from the Muslim Brotherhood. General Abdel Fatah Al-Sissi did just that.
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood is only in power in Tripolitania (western Libya), where it was brought to power by NATO. They are only welcome in Qatar and Turkey (which is not an Arab state). They are banned in the majority of Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia (whose monarch they tried to overthrow in 2013) and the United Arab Emirates (involving the crisis between Qatar and the other Gulf states). And above all in Syria (whose government they tried to overthrow in 1982 and to which they waged war, from 2011 to 2016, alongside Nato and Israel). They are about to do the same in Tunisia (which they ruled for a decade).
If the real objective of this massacre is not the status of Palestine, but the governance of Arab states, we can expect a wave of regime changes in the Middle East, each time to the benefit of the Brotherhood – in short, a kind of second “Arab Spring” [3].
As during the Arab Spring, the British services are responsible for the Brotherhood’s communications. We remember the way they promoted Brother Abdelhakim Belhaj in Libya [4] or the magnificent logos they designed for the host of jihadist groups in Syria. Leaks to the Foreign Office confirmed all this. This time, they created a new character, Abu Obeida, the spokesman for the fighting organization in Gaza. This man, unknown until recently, has suddenly become a star in the Muslim world, where posters of him are being snapped up. Well-trained in public speaking, he handles symbols with an ease unprecedented among Sunni leaders.
Arab governments are therefore acting cautiously, supporting the creation of a Palestinian state while keeping their distance from Hamas. While Hamas is doing everything to make the creation of a Palestinian state impossible.
After the Crash 