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DMZ America Podcast #145: Mass Graves in Gaza, Imperial Presidency, Menthol Madness

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Ted Rall

Political cartoonists Ted Rall (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) debate the week in news and culture as friendly adversaries to bring you spirited debate and smart insight.

First up: The Israel-Hamas War seems to be entering some sort of tipping point in terms of international public opinion. As the International Criminal Court weighs issuing an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his government’s policy of blockade and mass starvation in Gaza and student protests over America’s support of Israel spread from Columbia University to college and university campuses around the nation, the disturbing discovery of a pair of mass graves containing the bodies of hospital patients and personnel apparently summarily executed in areas under IDF control prompt Scott to say that, if this is confirmed to be an Israeli war crime, he would be done with Israel after supporting the Jewish state for many years.

Second: The US Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case with ramifications both for Donald Trump’s January 6th insurrection case and the separation of powers under the US Constitution. The court is asked to answer the question of whether a president enjoys absolute immunity for acts committed while in office, whether immunity might be partial, and whether it’s possible to separate those acts committed as an individual from those performed as an officeholder. At stake: the nature of the nation’s top political job.

Finally: In an act that appears to reek of cynicism, the Biden Administration has paused a long-planned ban on menthol-flavored tobacco products, which are popular among Black Americans, because of concerns that Black voters might be annoyed at the President when they go to the polls this November. Vote for us before you die, please.


Watch the Video Version: here.

Israel Has Crossed Its Rubicon

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Ted Rall

           A few weeks ago, from an international and domestic-U.S. PR standpoint, Israel might have been able to bring its war in Gaza in for a hard landing. Now it has painted itself into a corner.

Gaza has been destroyed. By this time next year, so will Israel—not its physical plant, but its current status as a privileged, funded, protected nation-state.

The damage inflicted thus far is so severe and thorough that the Gaza Strip will be uninhabitable for the foreseeable future, at least several years. All or most of its 2.3 million residents, transformed into refugees, will be permanently displaced.

Nothing can change that. If a left-wing Israeli government were to come to power, unilaterally end the war and offer the Palestinians their own sovereign independent republic side-by-side with Israel, Gaza would need to be rebuilt at a cost of tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. In the meantime, the Jewish state would have to provide long-term housing and public assistance for more than 2 million Palestinians throughout years of reconstruction. “You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” Raphael Cohen, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told the Associated Press. But where?

Assuming that a new regime could muster the necessary political consensus and address the ensuing security concerns surrounding a massive population of internally displaced people, Israel is a small nation of fewer than 10 million people with high unemployment and an aging population; it can’t afford such a massive undertaking or the demographics to quickly absorb 2 million traumatized Palestinians.

De facto, Gaza has been been ethnically cleansed. Gazans have been herded from the north, which has been flattened, to the south, against which IDF airstrike targeters and ground forces have recently turned their attention. The vast majority of the population of Gaza is now massed a few miles away from the Rafah border crossing to the Sinai Peninsula. All that remains is for the Israelis to expel the traumatized and radicalized Palestinians into the Egyptian desert.

More likely, Israel will open the gate. The Gazans enter the Sinai of their own accord. Where else can they go? There is no home to which they can return. This second Nakba will occur early next year.

Which will leave the ruins of Gaza desolate and dangerous. Spurred by legitimate public-health concerns, Israeli bulldozers will cart away the rubble and the tens of thousands of rotting corpses trapped underneath. Demining experts will have to find and disarm tens of thousands of unexploded bombs, a process that can require decades.

The end result: 141 square miles of prime beachfront property. Real-estate developers abhor nothing more than a vacuum along a scenic coastline. Sandals Gaza City will look smashing jammed next to Club Med Khan Yunis.

This was the thinking behind the Israeli intelligence officials who wrote a “thinking” memo that suggested that the situation be exploited as a rare opportunity to drive out all the locals so they could seize and annex the entire territory of Gaza. The revelations that Netanyahu’s government obtained Hamas’ detailed plans for the incursion a year ago, viewed a video on social media  that showed Hamas fighters training for the horror through repeated drills inside a mocked-up kibbutz (jihadi culture requires those about to stage a raid to warn their enemy in advance), Egypt warned Israel that Hamas was about to attack days ahead in advance, and that the IDF failed to respond for at least eight hours after Hamas breached Israel’s high-tech “smart fence” around Gaza (despite receiving an instant alert) prompts the cynic in me to wonder whether the Israeli government let October 7th happen on purpose.

What, Netanyahu and his colleagues may have asked themselves, are a few hundred or even a few thousand Israeli lives compared to the chance to get rid of half the Palestinians in Palestine, and join Gaza to Israel in the bargain?

If so, they miscalculated. U.S. officials have conveyed to their Israeli counterparts that Israel only has a few weeks left before losing international support and suffering a “strategic defeat.” Israel plans to continue for months.

The U.S. assessment is too optimistic.

The die is cast. Defeat is inevitable.

Public opinion is trending in favor of Palestine against Israel. By this point next year an appalled world, including a huge majority of American voters, will have witnessed the abject misery and injustice of the forced displacement of more than 2 million innocent civilians. Oceans of tents in the desert, screaming orphans and wounded ex-Gazans will fill high-definition social media and broadcast screens day after disgusting day. Public support for Palestine, already at historically record levels, will be so overwhelming that governments everywhere will find the pressure impossible to ignore. It will no longer be just the usual suspects in the Arab world who issue formal protests. From Tokyo to Ottawa to Paris to Rome, it will be politically untenable for any government to allow itself to be seen as complicit with the most outrageous war crime since the Vietnam War.

Eventually, the U.S. will have to ghost Israel. No more emergency war packages, no more $4 billion a year in military and other foreign aid. Even under a second Trump Administration, we might recall our ambassador.

Israel can’t see it yet. But it is well on its way to international pariah status at a scale which apartheid-era South Africa, its close Cold War ally which also went too far, could never have imagined.

(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.)

Israel’s Real Goal in Gaza? To Kill the Buildings

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Ted Rall

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.)

An Officer and a War Criminal

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Ted Rall

The Washington Post ran a shocking expose revealing that Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a possible candidate for the presidency, participated and legally justified war crimes including torture after having volunteered to serve at the Guantánamo concentration camp. Even more shocking than his disgusting actions, which should have landed him in prison for the rest of his life, is the lack of reaction by politicians of both political parties as well as other media outlets. A nation that normalizes torture to the point of shrugging its collective shoulders has lost its moral compass.

Committed

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Ted Rall

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks journalist who published revelations about US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, is closer to being extradited to the United States to face espionage charges in a kangaroo court. Meanwhile, the criminals he exposed live comfortable lives.

Fascism? You’re Soaking In It.

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Ted Rall

Americans say the country is exceptional. Democrats make excuses for Joe Biden acting just like Donald Trump when it comes to human rights and common decency. There is no “besides that.”

Bidenism: Let’s Do 1/2 of a Lot of Good Things

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Ted Rall

Joe Biden is running a presidential campaign predicated on the assumption that there is a middle ground between two extreme sides on every issue. Truth is, the mood of the electorate is binary on a lot of things and are they really wrong? It’s not like you can save just half the planet.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Working for the U.S. Government Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

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Ted Rall

http://www.trumanlittlewhitehouse.com/images/buck-stops-here-sign.jpg

Harry Truman famously kept a sign on his desk that read: “The buck stops here.” (“Buck” is a disused term for “accountability,” not money.) What Truman’s phrase meant — it says a lot about the state of things that it needs to be explained — was that he, like the captain of a ship, accepted responsibility for everything that happened under his watch.

With Barack Obama, there’s nary a buck to be found. To paraphrase the 1970 movie “Love Story,” working for the United States government means never having to say you’re sorry.

Days before Obama took office in 2009, Obama signaled that federal workers who break the law would have nothing to worry about. During his campaign he’d promised to prosecute the CIA and military personnel who tortured Afghans, Iraqis and other Muslims under orders from Bush and Cheney. People who voted for him expected him to follow through. The CIA torturers were worried sick. Their victims looked forward to seeing justice served.

Breaking his pledge, Obama issued the monsters a “get out of jail free” card. There wouldn’t even be an investigation, much less indictments. “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he said. The new president traveled to Langley to reassure the torturers everything would be cool. (“I will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are vigorous in protecting the American people.”) He even cooperated with the Republicans who approved of torture to pressure other countries not to file charges against U.S. torturers.

After 9/11, Americans asked themselves: why do they (Muslims in general, foreigners in particular) hate us?

No need to ask that one anymore.

One telltale sign that the government is engaged in a cover-up is timing: when it releases a report just before the weekend news blackout, you know something nasty is afoot. Obama’s latest whitewash, dumped online Friday, is the Administration’s attempt to drown its responsibility for one of the most heinous acts of mass murder in years in 3000 pages of spin, dissembling and circular logic.

On October 3rd, an AC-130 fixed-wing gunship — a fearsome array of high-caliber weaponry best described as a hovering battleship — unleashed an hour of hellfire on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, killing 42 doctors, staffers and patients, and wounding many others. The facility was completely destroyed. MSF (the French acronym for the group) pulled out. There is no longer any high-quality trauma care available in a major city in an active conflict zone.

It is now universally acknowledged that the attack was a mistake.

At the time, however, the Pentagon lied and denied. “Collateral damage,” they first said — they were aiming at something else. For an hour. Over and over. Then they said the Taliban were firing at U.S. forces from inside the hospital. (Never happened.) Next they blamed Afghan forces for calling in the airstrike. (They couldn’t have, and didn’t.) Finally, they admitted it was U.S. Special Forces.

Ultimately the new commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan issued an actual apology on March 22nd. “They hit us six months ago and are apologizing now?” spat Zabiullah Niazi, an OR nurse who lost his eye, one finger and the ability to use his hand, in the attack — and, like the other victims, has yet to receive compensation.

The heavily-redacted 3000-page report issued Friday by the Pentagon “describes a mission that went wrong from start to finish,” according to The New York Times. What stands out is the Americans’ obsession with protecting themselves at all cost, all others be damned — an attitude that has characterized the post-9/11 War of Terror.

“Even after Doctors Without Borders informed American commanders that a gunship was attacking a hospital, the airstrike was not immediately called off because, it appears, the Americans could not confirm themselves that the hospital was actually free of Taliban,” reports the Times. “‘Immediately calling for a cease-fire for a situation we have no SA’ — situational awareness, that is — ‘could put the ground force at risk,’ an American commander [said].” If you’re trying not to hurt innocent people, prudence dictates that you hold fire until your target is positively identified. Here, as usual in U.S. war zones, the default mode was to keep firing no matter what.

This is reckless disregard for human life writ large. So who will be held accountable?

“The punishments for the attack will be ‘administrative actions’ only, and none of those being disciplined will face criminal charges because the attack was determined to be unintentional… The punishments include suspension, removal from command and letters of reprimand, which can seriously damage or end a career.”

Reckless disregard for human life is a war crime. For example, former Rwandan official Clément Kayishema was convicted by an international tribunal for several counts of war crimes related to murder of Hutus in 1994, one of which was his reckless disregard for the possibility that his actions would lead to people’s deaths.

Forty-two people were murdered in Kunduz. So what if it’s just manslaughter or second-degree murder, rather than premeditated first-degree murder? Justice demands prison sentences, not letters added to personnel files.

I’d start with the guy who sits behind Harry Truman’s old desk.

(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)

 

The Traitors Within

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Ted Rall

Shockingly for patriotic Muslims, thousands of naive young Muslims are committing treason against their own people, rejecting their homeland to travel to the United States, where they join the terrorist military. Why would anyone join a group responsible for horrific atrocities, which have been documented on video?

Soul Hack

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Ted Rall

Dick Cheney says he worries that terrorists could kill him by hacking into his artificial heart, which can be controlled via a wireless Internet connection.

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