For Democratic voters, especially liberal women, this election comes down to abortion rights. For those who are also concerned about Gaza, they point out that Donald Trump might be even worse than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, in terms of their support of Israel. For the people of Gaza, including women, it’s a distinction without a difference.
It is a truism bordering on a cliché that the Israeli state and Palestinian resistance organizations have inflicted violence upon one another, claiming the lives of thousands of innocent people on both sides. Media coverage of the carnage has been anything but evenhanded, however. Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, Western media have noted and covered and analyzed attacks against Israelis by groups like the PLO and Hamas in painstaking detail, while almost completely ignoring Israeli attacks against Palestinians—and the oppressive high-tech apartheid system Israel created to oppress millions of Palestinians under military occupation—this despite the fact that the death and trauma toll on the Palestinian side has consistently been many times higher.
For the last seven months, for the first time since the Naqba, Palestinian suffering has finally appeared on the radar of the Western press. As usual, this latest spasm of violence has cost many more Palestinian lives—35,000 in Gaza—than Israeli—1,200 on October 7th. (Because the official Gaza death count does not count bodies trapped under the rubble, it is an underestimate.)
That’s basically a 30-to-1 ratio. Now establishment journalists are demanding that everyone, including college student demonstrators, devote equal mention and opprobrium—good dead people on both sides, to coin a phrase.
“Note how one-sided all of this is,” complains Max Boot in The Washington Post. “While denouncing alleged Israeli atrocities, [a statement issued by Columbia University pro-Gaza protesters] has not one word of censure for Hamas or its brutal tactics, which include seizing hostages and perpetrating sexual violence, in addition to committing wholesale murder. Indeed, even though the protesters claim to care about Palestinian lives, they do not denounce Hamas for stealing international aid to build its tunnels and missiles or for using civilians as human shields. They call for Israel to stop fighting but not for Hamas to release its hostages or surrender.” What’s really one-sided, of course, is the loss of life and infrastructure. No one has flattened Israeli cities, razed its schools or demolished its synagogues, graveyards and historic sites. Protesters figure that they don’t need to mention the horrors of October 7th because the media has already done that in great detail.
To give credit where it’s due, Boot’s call for grief-concern parity is a marked improvement. In the past, neither he nor his ilk talked about Israel’s wholesale land theft in the West Bank, its concentration camps and torture facilities, or the IDF’s total lack of concern for Palestinian lives at all.
So let’s be fair. Zionists are absolutely correct that Hamas and October 7th should be condemned. Supporters of the Gazans are also correct that Israel’s insane overreaction, including its war crimes, must be condemned. Said condemnation should be in direct proportion to the scale of the acts.
Israel has slaughtered 30 times more people, for no good reason other than politics and pure entertainment, as Hamas, which did it for no good reason other than spite and attention. Going forward, therefore, Western journalism should look like this:
Hamas is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
Israel is disgusting and must be stopped.
(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.)
Pro-Israel students at colleges and universities like Columbia claim that they feel endangered when they see pro-Palestine antiwar protests on campus and hear phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Everyone is entitled to their own baseless feelings, but let’s not forget who has REAL cause to fear for their lives–those in Gaza who are being slaughtered by Israel.
With nearly 30,000 Palestinians killed by Israel and Gaza, America’s support for the Jewish state is being tested more than ever. Now the U.S. has found itself in the position of having to vote against a ceasefire resolution for the third time. Obviously this level of support is unsustainable given the ongoing genocide.
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!
The swing state of Michigan will be in play next year, and many analysts predict that the Muslim diaspora in that state could prove pivotal. But which major candidate can they vote for? Donald Trump wears his Islamophobia on his sleeve with his repeated calls to limit Muslims from traveling to the US, as well as his loudly-declared support for Israel. Joe Biden, however, looks even worse as he declares “I am a Zionist” even after Israel wantonly slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza while barely giving Hamas a scratch. Choose your poison!
Supporters of Israel claim that, before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was never a nation called Palestine or people called Palestinians. While the second statement is untrue, one wonders, even if this were true, how would that justify the colonial takeover and displacement of the people who lived there before?
One of the more tone-deaf talking points of Israel and its supporters is to accuse neighboring Arab states of being cruel to the Palestinians because they refuse to accept them as refugees. Setting aside the fact that countries like Egypt and Jordan already have millions of Palestinian exiles from previous wars, Israel is tacitly admitting that they are trying to impose ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. Like Germany before World War II, which demanded that other countries accept Jews, Israel wants to turn Arab states into collaborators.
Political cartoonist Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) discuss the week in politics and current events and culture. This week, the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Birmingham, Alabama’s experiment with a universal basic income.
In the first segment of this week’s DMZ America podcast, Ted and Scott dig deeper than ever before into the domestic and international implications of the war in Gaza. The two cartoonists delve into Israel’s right to exist, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in administrative detention, hostage exchanges, and whether there is a future two-state solution or whether a future single Republic of Palestine could reasonably accommodate members of all ethnic groups.
In the second part of the DMZ America podcast this week, Scott explains an experiment in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in which single women are paid a universal basic income of $385 per month. The mayor says he wants to renew it because it’s doing well. Should a universal basic income be adopted by the United States? Ted and Scott talk about the economic and cultural risks and rewards of giving people a paycheck without having to work, with an emphasis on the fact that automation and artificial intelligence may make it so that society has no choice.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 126 Sec 1: Gaza — Left vs. Right
DMZ America Podcast Ep 126 Sec 2: Alabama’s Basic Universal Income
The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas related to the hostage exchange reveals the Israeli secret of “administrative detention,” in which thousands of innocent men, women and children are tortured and jailed in Israel, simply for the crime of being Palestinian.
