At first, it seems strange that the United States is dropping food aid to the besieged people of Gaza at the same time Israel is dropping bombs made in the U.S. to kill them. Could it be that the U.S. is trying to fatten them up in order to make them bigger, easier targets for the Israelis?
“The world is kind of deserting Israel right now,” Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. “So they’re worried about that.”
Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on October 7th, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked widespread sympathy as well as material support for the Jewish state, polls show that popular opinion in the U.S. and internationally has turned against Israel at unprecedented levels. The UN secretary-general is angry, the International Court of Justice is giving serious consideration to the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and even President Joe Biden—a self-described Zionist who has repeatedly visited Israel and rushed to send it weapons after October 7th—has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that continuing his ground offensive into Rafah, the last relatively intact city left in the Strip, would cross his “red line.”
Israelis and their supporters are confused. Why is Israel rapidly sliding into pariah status now?
Netanyahu has forgotten that Israel is a U.S. vassal state. They don’t call the shots. We do. Bibi nonetheless has insolently rejected Biden’s ultimatum.
Israelis’ cluelessness is understandable. They’ve been oppressing the Palestinians for decades. They’ve ignored UN resolutions requiring that they stop occupying Arab territory, they’ve sent nearly a million religious fanatics to colonize the West Bank, and they’ve run the only apartheid state in the world following the end of that system in South Africa—yet nothing bad has ever happened to them. America kept sending them billions of dollars a year, arming them with high-tech weapons and intelligence, and ran interference for them at the UN whenever the world tried to hold them accountable for human rights abuses. Why should the good times come to an end?
The answer, of course, is two-fold. The systemic decimation of Gaza, caught in high-definition videos on social media in an act of ethnic cleansing obviously intended to be succeeded by annexation, is even more extreme than Israel’s previous crimes. Israel’s war against the innocent civilians of Gaza is the feather that broke the world’s patience and indifference…a one-ton feather.
That the world would turn away from Israel was easy to see coming tens of thousands of dead Gazans ago.
For everyone but the Israelis, that is.
Israelis are not stupid people. How did they fail to anticipate that they would soon be shunned and despised for what most of the world sees as a grotesque and opportunistic overreaction to October 7th? As a nation created by the UN, no other country depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival.
Israel, you’ll notice if you visit, is along with North Korea and the United States one of the most insular countries on earth. Whereas most of the world and its news coverage is omnivorously internationalist, and floods in Myanmar or a coup in Central America makes the top of the news, Israel, like the U.S., obsesses over its own domestic affairs to the exclusion of all else with the exception of events that impact it directly—and it does so from an unabashedly nationalist viewpoint.
Like the U.S., Israel is a melting pot of immigrants where assimilation is expected to include learning the national language. Unlike us, who have been blessed with seeing our mother tongue spread as the 20th and 21st centuries’ lingua franca, more than 90% of Israelis read and speak one of the most globally useless languages anywhere, an artificially revived form of long-dead Hebrew. Curious Americans looking for viewpoints outside the MSM echo chamber can access the BBC and the CBC and Al Jazeera English for foreign coverage in the English language. Israelis looking for alternative news and opinions in Hebrew have no options.
Founded in large part by Holocaust survivors, veterans of numerous wars and beleaguered by countless terrorist attacks, it is completely understandable why Israelis are obsessed with security. But security is a two-edged sword. When you keep other people out, you yourself remain inside. And you are deprived of the insights and different ways of looking at things people get when they interact with others and opinions that differ from their own.
It’s also not very effective. Israel, a self-declared safe haven for global Jewry, is by far the most dangerous country for Jewish people.
Consider, for example, the massive “smart” high-tech security walls Israel built to keep out residents of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. They were remarkably effective (until October 7th) at segregating populations that Israelis have come to view as dangerous, if not as inherent enemies. At the same time, Israelis now have no day-to-day interaction with their Arab neighbors. They don’t do business together, they don’t make friends, they don’t date, they don’t talk, they can’t get each other. Walling off Gaza is such an extreme act that it cuts off Israel from the Mediterranean Sea; no country interested in its internal security or military strategy voluntarily relinquishes access to the sea. Even the Arab Israelis who comprise 20% of Israel’s population have found themselves discriminated against, isolated and alienated within their own country.
It’s the height of irony. It’s not just the people of Gaza who live in a giant open-air concentration camp. Survivors of Germany’s camps have built their own prison camp—for themselves—and it’s the biggest, most effective one of them all.
No wonder Israelis can’t relate to the rest of the planet. They’ve been living on the inside so long they don’t see the real world anymore. Colonialism, a distinctly 19th and early 20th century project, is an anachronism. Apartheid too. Israelis don’t see that opposing the war against Gaza isn’t the same as anti-Zionism, which itself isn’t the same as anti-Semitism. They don’t understand that, these days, even if you don’t care about the people you are killing to steal their land, you have to pretend that you do (e.g., Biden’s parachute drops of food supplies into the same place his bombs are killing the starving locals).
A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 75% of Jewish Israelis think the country should ignore pressure from the U.S. to wind down the war in Gaza. A poll by Gallup showed that 65% oppose an independent Palestinian state. “It isn’t fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observes. That’s how white South Africans felt about Blacks during apartheid. Now, of course, they’re fine. So it would be in a unified post-apartheid Palestine.
Now the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has formally issued a Biden-approved verbal demand for regime change in Israel, saying that Israel should call new elections, which polls indicate Netanyahu might lose.
Yet Netanyahu persists. “No international pressure will stop Israel,” the prime minister says, pledging to attack Rafah despite Biden’s warning.
“Isolated, cloistered, militaristic and more unhinged than ever, Israel is becoming the North Korea of the Middle East,” Uri Misgav writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israelis need to tear down their paranoia-grounded security walls—not just to liberate the Palestinians, though that is way overdue!—but to free themselves.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
After surviving genocide in Europe during World War II, Jews moved to the state of Israel where they displaced and oppressed the local Palestinians. Now the Palestinians are the ones who are suffering from genocide at the hands of the Israelis. You know what comes next!
In the latest DMZ America Podcast, editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) explore the threat of the Israel-Hamas War spreading from Gaza, where 1% of the total population has been killed, to Iran, the Red Sea and Lebanon and beyond. Ted, who sympathizes with the cause of Palestinian emancipation, presses Scott, who supports Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7th attack, on what line Israel would need to cross before he would consider them to have gone too far. It’s a tough debate, and a passionate one, but the guys manage to keep things civilized and productive enough to agree on what policy the U.S. should adopt toward the Netanyahu government in light of the flattening of Gaza and the humanitarian crisis.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast: Here.
Supporters of Israel, who are mostly on the Right, believe the Israeli government’s official story, which is that the Jewish state’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza has one objective: deposing Hamas so its fighters and government no longer pose a threat. According to this narrative, Palestinian civilian deaths are unavoidable collateral damage in a densely-populated urban environment.
Those who are not siloed into Team Politics on the conflict, like human rights groups, are convinced that the bombing is indiscriminate—that Israel is bombing willy-nilly because they’re reacting with blind rage to Hamas’ October 7th attack.
Supporters of Palestine, mostly on the Left, think that Israel is actively targeting civilians in a gleeful bloodthirsty campaign of genocide, trying to massacre as many innocents as possible.
They are all wrong.
Israel isn’t trying to kill people.
It’s trying to kill buildings.
People die when buildings get bombed. But killing people is not the Israelis’ goal. They’re out to flatten Gaza. Flattening some Gazans is a side effect of flattening buildings.
Most species don’t go extinct after being hunted to death. Their habitat is destroyed.
Israel’s war aim in Gaza, I believe, is to destroy so many apartment buildings and shops and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure that the territory becomes uninhabitable.
The IDF may already have accomplished that. According to the UN, 45% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. 1.5 million out of a total population of 2.3 million are “internally displaced,” i.e. homeless and living on the streets. Only one out of the 18 hospitals in northern Gaza, until six weeks ago the Strip’s most populous area, is still functioning. Four weeks into the war, 61% of all employment in Gaza was gone—this in a previously impoverished place with sky-high unemployment.
Imagine if the protesters calling for a ceasefire got their way. That a permanent ceasefire took effect tomorrow. Imagine that the war came to an end, that Israel told the residents of Gaza that they could safely return home.
Return to what?
Half the population has no home to return to. (That number increases with each Israeli bomb.) Upon returning to their homes, many of them damaged, the other half would have no water or electricity or fuel or telephone or Internet service, no shops or stores to buy food or clothing or anything else, no income and therefore no money to buy it with, no school to send their kids to, no hospital to treat them when they fell sick or were injured.
A New York Times reporter, who described himself as “stunned” and who had lived in Gaza before the latest war described “a landscape so disfigured by 42 days of airstrikes and nearly three weeks of ground warfare that it was hard at times to understand where we were.”
David Ignatius of The Washington Post reports that northern Gaza “has been reduced to a skeleton. Standing on Salah al-Din Street in Gaza City a week ago, I saw shattered buildings in every direction.” It will be impossible for anyone to live in such a disaster zone. It’s not like Israel or the Saudis or anyone else will rush in to clean up the mess.
Anti-Zionist leftists think Israel is planning Nakba 2.0, a forced removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza in which the IDF would truck or march them out at gunpoint. Hot-headed Israeli politicians have fed that theory. So has a leaked internal Israeli government memorandum that touts “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in co-ordination with the Egyptian government.” In a replay of 1948, the Israeli government refuses to guarantee a “right to return” home after the conclusion of military operations.
All this adds up to an inescapable conclusion: after the Gaza Strip has been ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population, Israel will annex it.
While annexation is certainly the objective, I don’t believe the Israelis intend to murder all the Palestinians or expel them into the desert by force. Israel is already facing severe international opprobrium; such a radical move would turn it into a pariah state. Even the U.S. would sever ties.
Israel has something else in mind: Palestinians will leave Gaza of their own accord.
The Gaza Strip is now an unlivable hellscape filled with piles of rubble covering thousands of dead bodies. Rotting bodies hasten the transmission of nasty diseases like tuberculosis and cholera. According to Euro-Med Monitor, contact with dead bodies leaking feces, soiled clothing, and contaminated tools or vehicles can spread hepatitis, tuberculosis, and HIV, and ruin ground water supplies. Birds, rodents and insects eat bodies and spread other diseases, including malaria.
War keeps killing people years after “peace” returns. Rubble is dangerous. Bombs and unexploded ordnance must be professionally cleared away, a process that takes years, even decades.
Shortly after October 7th, the IDF dropped flyers over northern Gaza ordering the population to evacuate south, into a “safe zone.” Most people complied. The IDF now controls the north.
Now a second round of leaflets is falling on eastern Khan Younis, the biggest city in southern Gaza, ordering people to flee from the southeast to the southwest in preparation for IDF carpet-bombing there as well.
A glance at a map reveals what the Israelis are up to: they are herding the Palestinians southwest.
What’s southwest? The Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
Once the Gazan refugees are massed against the gates of Rafah, Israel will open the border. Palestinians will stream into and across the Sinai Peninsula in search of villages, towns and cities where they might have some sort of future.
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi sees the near future. “What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Sisi complains. But he can’t do anything to prevent it.
Such an eventuality would mean “that we move the idea of resistance, of combat, from the Gaza Strip to Sinai, and so Sinai would become the base for launching operations against Israel,” Sisi warns in a message that implies he sees the Palestinianization of the Sinai as inevitable.
If Sisi’s prediction comes true, it will be a huge win for Israel. Most importantly, Israel would annex Gaza. They’d clean up the debris, cart away the rubble, and transform Gaza into luxurious seaside resorts and vacation homes. If and when the re-displaced Gazans eventually manage to reconstitute themselves enough to once again launch airstrikes into Israel, rockets from Hamas (or whatever new organization will replace it) would be farther away from major Israeli population centers.
Forcing the population of Gaza to flee by destroying the territory’s infrastructure is the war crime of ethnic cleansing, defined in a UN report on the collapse of Yugoslavia as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.”
An indigenous resistance organization embedded into a civilian population like Hamas cannot be bombed into oblivion; the U.S. experience against the Taliban demonstrates that indiscriminate military action only increases support for your enemy. The IDF is aware of this; their U.S. allies keep reminding them of America’s failed counterterrorism operations after 9/11. Israel is far too aware of its dependence on U.S. political and financial support to think about killing all 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians—which, besides, would also disgust and alienate most Israeli citizens, no matter how enraged they are at Hamas.
Ethnic cleansing with the goal of annexing Gaza is the only plausible explanation for Israel’s behavior since October 7th.
Israel is willing to kill the people. But they’re really out to kill the buildings.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Political Cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the hot news and current events of the week on the DMZ America podcast. On DMZ, you’ll hear two best friends who happen to come from opposite sides of American politics. Ted and Scott disagree, passionately, but they’re always calm, civilized and respectful. DMZ is a no-yelling zone!
First up this week: Ted and Scott debate the phrase “From the River to Sea” in the context of the heated debate over Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Is it genocidal or a kumbaya dream? Does Israel have a “right to exist”? Is Hamas exaggerating or underplaying the death count? Who will govern post-Hamas Gaza? Is Israel planning to annex some or all of Gaza? You won’t want to miss this smart take on the Middle East crisis.
Second up this week: Ted and Scott reflect on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempt to avoid a government shutdown by—gasp!—working with Democrats. Will acting like adults get Republicans credit? Is it even possible? Can a shutdown be avoided? Will Johnson go the way of Kevin McCarthy and have his gavel taken away too?
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 125 Sec 1: Is “From the River to the Sea” Genocidal?
DMZPodcast Ep 125 Sec 2: Mike Johnson Flirts with Adulting
Eventually, the economist said, we’ll all be dead. In Iraq, sooner rather than later.
Stop the Genocide . . . in Iraq
posted by Susan Stark
Have you ever heard of the phrase, “selective compassion”?
This would characterize anyone, particularly Westerners, who zealously champion the cause of the Darfurians.
The actess Mia Farrow, and journalists like Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice and Nick Kristof of the New York Times shout at the top of their computer software and shed hot tears for Darfur. They regularly use their columns and celebrity status to guilt-trip us that we are not doing enough to “save” the hundreds of thousands who have died, and the millions who’ve become refugees in the Sudan.
And, I would have to agree with them. We aren’t doing enough. But . . . is it really “our” job to do anything for the Darfurians? I am about to argue, heresy of heresies, that it’s not.
It may be the job of the Europeans, the Africans, the Asians, or even the South Americans to save Darfur. Maybe it’s the job of Canadians to save Darfur.
But for Americans, our task is to save Iraqis, not Darfurians. There are now around 700, 000 Iraqis dead as a result of the Iraq War, and there are 3 million refugees, either exiled or internally displaced. And we Americans are either directly or indirectly responsible for this condition, whether we’ve supported the War or not, because we pay for it with our tax dollars. And if such a condition in Darfur is called a “genocide”, then the same label also applies for Iraq.
Yet, you don’t see Ms. Farrow or Mr. Hentoff or Mr. Kristof crying and guilt-tripping Americans over these pour souls. I guess it’s easier see genocide when some else is doing it, like the Arab Sudanese, then when you are doing it. Yes, all this constant concern for Darfurians provides a wonderful distraction away from the many more Iraqis suffering under the same conditions.
To all of these “selectively compassionate” celebrities and journalists shedding crocodile tears for Darfur, I say this: You can stop the waterworks right now, and you can start doing something for the Iraqis suffering because of you.
Stop the Genocide in Iraq.
http://www.lifeusa.org/site/PageServer?pagename=a_iraqidps
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/iraq.cfm
http://www.uuiraq.org/english/175.htm
http://ga3.org/campaign/Iraqi_refugees
Oh, and let’s not forget Afghanistan:
