Israel is committing horrific war crimes in Gaza with openly genocidal intent, and it is heartbreaking to see RFK Jr defending this inhumanity.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: JeremyRHammond.com

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

Another participant rolled out the Zionist propaganda trope that life in Gaza improved dramatically after it came under Israeli occupation in 1967, to which I responded by pasting an excerpt from my e-book Exposing a Zionist Hoax: How Elan Journo’s “What Justice Demands” Deceives Readers about the Palestine Conflict.

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”.

I then pointed out that the Foreword to my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict was written by former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories Richard Falk, who is Jewish.

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.