Tag Archives: Operation Cast Lead

In Gaza genocide, US defends Israel’s ‘aura of power’

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As South Africa accuses Israel of genocide, the Biden administration endorses Israel’s bid to sow “fear” in Gaza’s defenseless civilians.

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

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.”

Israel is Captive to its “Destructive Process”

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By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

Raul Hilberg in his monumental work, “The Destruction of the European Jews” chronicled a process of repression that at first was “relatively mild” but led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination and ended with mass murder. “The destructive process was a development that was begun with caution and ended without restraint,” Hilberg wrote.

The Palestinians over the past few decades have endured a similar “destructive process.” They have gradually been stripped of basic civil liberties, robbed of assets including much of their land and often their homes, have suffered from mounting restrictions on their physical movements, been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce, and found themselves increasingly impoverished and finally trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank.

“The process of destruction [of the European Jews] unfolded in a definite pattern,” Hilberg wrote. “It did not, however, proceed from a basic plan. No bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what kind of measures would be taken in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to foretell the configuration of the undertaking in 1942. The destructive process was a step-by-step operation, and the administrator could seldom see more than one step ahead.”

There will never be transports or extermination camps for the Palestinians, but amid increasing violence against Palestinians larger and larger numbers of them will die, in airstrikes, targeted assassinations and other armed attacks. Hunger and misery will expand. Israeli demands for “transfer” — the forced expulsion of Palestinians from occupied territory to neighboring countries — will grow.

The Palestinians in Gaza live in conditions that now replicate those first imposed on Jews by the Nazis in the ghettos set up throughout Eastern Europe. Palestinians cannot enter or leave Gaza. They are chronically short of food — the World Health Organization estimates that more than 50 percent of children in Gaza and the West Bank under 2 years old have iron deficiency anemia and reports that malnutrition and stunting in children under 5 are “not improving” and could actually be worsening. Palestinians often lack clean water. They are crammed into unsanitary hovels. They do not have access to basic medical care. They are stateless and lack passports or travel documents. There is massive unemployment. They are daily dehumanized in racist diatribes by their occupiers as criminals, terrorists and mortal enemies of the Jewish people.

“A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently of the Palestinians. “They sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion.”

Ayelet Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, on her Facebook page June 30 posted an article written 12 years ago by the late Uri Elitzur, a leader in the settler movement and a onetime adviser to Netanyahu, saying the essay is as “relevant today as it was then.” The article said in part: “They [the Palestinians] are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

The belief that a race or class of people is contaminated is used by ruling elites to justify quarantining the people of that group. But quarantine is only the first step. The despised group can never be redeemed or cured — Hannah Arendt noted that all racists see such contamination as something that can never be eradicated. The fear of the other is stoked by racist leaders such as Netanyahu to create a permanent instability. This instability is exploited by a corrupt power elite that is also seeking the destruction of democratic civil society for all citizens — the goal of the Israeli government (as well as the goal of a U.S. government intent on stripping its own citizens of rights). Max Blumenthal in his book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” does a masterful job of capturing and dissecting this frightening devolution within Israel.

The last time Israel mounted a Gaza military assault as severe as the current series of attacks was in 2008, with Operation Cast Lead, which lasted from Dec. 27 of that year to Jan. 18, 2009. That attack saw 1,455 Palestinians killed, including 333 children. Roughly 5,000 more Palestinians were injured. A new major ground incursion, which would be designed to punish the Palestinians with even greater ferocity, would cause a far bigger death toll than Operation Cast Lead did. The cycle of escalating violence, this “destructive process,” as the history of the conflict has illustrated, would continue at an accelerating rate.

The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of Israel’s most brilliant scholars, warned that, followed to its logical conclusion, the occupation of the Palestinians would mean “concentration camps would be erected by the Israeli rulers” and “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.” He feared the ascendancy of right-wing, religious Jewish nationalists and warned that “religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism.” Leibowitz laid out what occupation would finally bring for Israel:

“The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”

Israel is currently attacking a population of 1.8 million that has no army, no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control and no heavy artillery. Israel pretends that this indiscriminate slaughter is a war. But only the most self-deluded supporter of Israel is fooled. The rockets fired at Israel by Hamas — which is committing a war crime by launching those missiles against the Israeli population — are not remotely comparable to the 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs that have been dropped in large numbers on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods; the forced removal of some 300,000 Palestinians from their homes; the more than 160 reported dead — the U.N. estimates that 77 percent of those killed in Gaza have been civilians; the destruction of the basic infrastructure; the growing food and water shortages; and the massing of military forces for a possible major ground assault.

When all this does not work, when it becomes clear that the Palestinians once again have not become dormant and passive, Israel will take another step, more radical than the last. The “process of destruction” will be stopped only from outside Israel. Israel, captive to the process, is incapable of imposing self-restraint.

A mass movement demanding boycotts, divestment and sanctions is the only hope now for the Palestinian people. Such a movement must work for imposition of an arms embargo on Israel; this is especially important for Americans because weapons systems and attack aircraft provided by the U.S. are being used to carry out the assault. It must press within the United States for cutoff of the $3.1 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. It must organize to demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to halt its “destructive process.” As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed. If we fail to act we are complicit in the slaughter.