The devastating news from Washington this week was that in spite of lip service against Israel’s war on the people of Gaza, the Biden administration “quietly” approved the transfer of more massive bombs to Israel.
Biden is sending along more than 2000 one-ton bombs and 500-pound bombs, the Washington Post reported (per Common Dreams).
“This is cowardly,” Yousef Munayyer wrote. “If you are going to be full backers of genocide, own it. We see you and history sees you as well.”
“This is obscene,” Bernie Sanders wrote. “We must end our complicity: No more bombs to Israel. The U.S. cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks.”
We can only imagine how horrifying such armaments are here in the West. Gazans don’t have to imagine. These instruments of annihilation have generated a neverending nightmare. Even the Washington Post says these bombs “are almost never used any more by Western militaries in densely populated locations due to the risk of civilian casualties.” But Israel has used them extensively.
Which is why more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority women and children. Israel justifies the slaughter of civilians by arguing that a majority of Palestinians approve of Hamas’s attack of last October. So, collective punishment is policy.
At least Biden’s hypocrisy is being reported in the Washington Post. And we are seeing a broad movement in progressive circles to end Israel’s immunity to international law.
Harvard Law School’s student government voted for the university to divest from Israel. The global activist network Avaaz has got half a million signatures calling for a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel.
America is Israel’s biggest arms dealer. You are giving American weapons to a government that is blocking life-saving aid and violating international law. This will only stop when you demand it stops.“
Public opinion is also horrified. A Gallup poll finds that 55 percent of Americans oppose Israel’s months-long military campaign (while 36 percent approve). “A mere 18% of Democratic voters approve of Israel’s effort.” And 75 percent disapprove.
Once again, Biden is going with the Israel lobby, and the big donors. But quietly.
Biden is not only defying his base. The liberal political establishment has now turned against Israel’s war. The head of the Democratic party thinktank, the Center for American Progress, called for a cutoff of aid.
The United States, by its own imposed standards, cannot heedlessly deliver offensive weapons as the Israeli government continues to bombard and starve innocents on a mass scale. These actions have nothing to do with self defense; they are clearly intended as collective punishment and are resulting in the complete devastation of Palestinians as a people.
The former top State Department human rights officer told NPR that it is time to apply the same rules to Israel as other countries. Charles Blaha:
[T]he State Department has said publicly that the same policy applies to Israel as apply to every other country. In practice, Israel gets special treatment…. You may recall the Biden administration suspended items that could be used in offensive air-to-ground operations for Saudi Arabia because they were causing civilian casualties. Those civilian casualties are nowhere near the civilian casualties that Israeli air-to-ground operations have caused so far. Yet unconditional transfers of air-to-ground munitions continue.
Joe Rogan called it “genocide” and a “holocaust” this week. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Israel was going too far. Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, trying to run from his own past, ran a piece saying, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible.”
And at the Stimson Center this week, when Barbara Slavin said it’s not genocide because it’s not equivalent to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda or the Nazis killing 6 million Jews, Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace shot down that defense.
The definition of genocide under international law does not require it to meet that bar… It does not have to rise to, Trying to kill every member of a race in the world [to be a genocide. The idea that] ‘it can’t be genocide if it doesn’t kill everybody.’ That isn’t what it means under international law.
So the genocide is having consequences, even in the cowardly seat of empire.
Thanks for reading,
Phil
No worries for Israel, or for Biden. In response to the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, Matthew Miller, spokesman for the U.S. State Department, uses Israel’s old stand-by defense, saying that she “has a history of anti-Semitic comments” and that “the allegations of genocide are unfounded.”
Besides bombs, we evidently are giving Israel targeting advice. Warren Strobel and Nancy Youssef report in the WSJ that “A secret memorandum that expanded intelligence sharing with Israel after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack has led to growing concerns in Washington about whether the information is contributing to civilian deaths, according to people familiar with the issue.”
Chris Hedges:
”We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.”
I would also add lionized Madeleine Albright’s answer to question put forth in a 60 Minutes interview:
“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
UN expert accuses Israel of ‘genocide’ in Gaza
Francesca Albanese says there are clear indications that Israel has violated three of five acts listed under UN Genocide Convention.
26 Mar 2024
“Albanese, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council but not an official voice on behalf of the United Nations, said she had found “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of … acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” she said.
The report was immediately rejected by Israel as an “obscene inversion of reality”.
Entitled Anatomy of a Genocide, the report listed the violating acts as: “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Albanese noted that Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7. A further 12,000 are reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.
More than 70 percent of the recorded deaths have been women and children and Israel has failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent – adult males – were active Hamas fighters, she said.
Regarding the second violated act, Albanese said Israeli forces have wounded more than 70,000 Palestinians and detained thousands of Palestinian men and boys, subjecting them to torture and mistreatment.
On the third act, Albanese said Israel has destroyed or severely damaged most of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure, including hospitals and agricultural land.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/un-expert-accuses-israel-of-several-acts-of-genocide-in-gaza
There’s an interesting twist to the whole issue of U.S. military aid to Israel – apparently the U.S. is forbidden by law to send weapons to states that violate various test bans on nuclear weapons. We may see some lawfare on the issue soon.
Somewhere down below, as close as someone can come to terra incognita, a rogue country had set off a nuclear bomb. A rogue country that was hoping not to get caught. It was the first and only time in history that a clandestine nuclear blast has taken place. And based on its analysis, US intelligence agencies concluded that the rogue country was Israel…..Now, 45 years later, that explosion could play a significant role in bringing an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza by using American lawfare to halt Israeli warfare—finally enforcing US laws that would cut off all aid, including the billions and billions of dollars and the tons and tons of weapons Israel now receives…. The problem for Israel—and a key reason for the secrecy involving the tests—was the Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act. Passed by Congress in 1977, the amendment aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states. It mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive US sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. The nuclear test was also a clear violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, to which Israel was a party…under US law, Israel must be banned from receiving its annual package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-nuclear-weapons/
A Genocide Foretold
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
Chris Hedges
Mar 30, 2024
“Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.”
“Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.”
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/a-genocide-foretold?r=b7qrf&triedRedirect=true