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Chris Hedges: The Death of Israel

Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted. 

But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy. 

Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.

Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.

Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. 

When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured. 

All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.

“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”

The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.

Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.

Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” 

Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.

The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.

Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza. 

The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.

As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.” 

Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.

The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.

December 19, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | 1 Comment

John Mearsheimer: Israel is Choosing ‘Apartheid’ or ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

 https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/john-mearsheimer-israel-is-choosing-apartheid-or-ethnic-cleansing/

Israel has gone far beyond “going after Hamas” in the first 10 weeks of its war on Gaza, according to one of the United States’ leading political scientists, John Mearsheimer.

He tells host Steve Clemons that murdering hundreds of civilians daily and starving the rest is a “punishment campaign” and “should be unacceptable to decent people all over the world.”

In this episode, Mearsheimer, who teaches international relations at the University of Chicago, looks into Israel’s long-term strategies and explains why the elites in the US, Europe and the Arab world are not taking concrete steps to stop Israel’s bombing campaign.

December 18, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nearly Half of All Israeli Munitions Dropped on Gaza are Imprecise ‘Dumb’ Bombs

Israeli warplanes have used at least 29,000 munitions on the Gaza Strip

By Dave DeCamp / Antiwar.com,  https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/15/nearly-half-of-all-israeli-munitions-dropped-on-gaza-are-imprecise-dumb-bombs/

Nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions Israel has dropped on the Gaza Strip are unguided or “dumb” bombs, CNN reported Thursday, citing a US intelligence assessment.

The report said Israel had used 29,000 air-to-ground munitions in its bombardment of Gaza, a total that does not include artillery shells and tank munitions that are also being fired on the Strip. The assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found 40-45% of the 29,000 munitions have been dumb bombs, and the rest have been precise guided munitions.

Unguided munitions are less precise and are generally considered more of a threat to civilians, but Israel is also slaughtering civilians with precision-guided munitions. A report from +972 Magazine revealed Israel is purposefully targeting civilian areas and launching strikes that might kill one Hamas commander, knowing hundreds of civilians will be killed.

Amnesty International conducted an investigation that found Israel targeted two homes in Gaza full of civilians using Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), US-provided kits that turn dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions. The strikes killed 40 people, including 19 children, and Amnesty is calling for it to be investigated as a war crime.

The intelligence assessment comes after President Biden called Israel’s Gaza bombing “indiscriminate” but vowed to keep supporting it anyway. Despite the massive civilian death toll in Gaza, the US has no plans to restrict military aid to Israel.

December 17, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Gaza Is Deliberately Being Made Uninhabitable

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, DEC 13, 2023  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-is-deliberately-being-made-uninhabitable?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=139740561&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

Infectious diseases are tearing through Gaza, whose healthcare system has been rendered almost nonexistent, and people are beginning to starve in massive numbers. All of this is due to concrete policy decisions made by Israel in its horrific assault on the Gaza Strip.

In an article titled “Gaza’s health system is ‘on its knees’ as Israel pushes into Khan Younis,” The Washington Post reports that the mass displacement of nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza has led to overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions that are rapidly giving rise to disease.

“Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical workers said they were recording new cases of acute hepatitis, scabies, measles and upper respiratory infections, mostly among children,” the Post reports. “Infectious diseases are spreading fast, said Imad al-Hams, a physician at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, as people crowd into tiny slivers of land to escape advancing Israeli forces.”

In a recent interview with CNN, Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Marie-Aure Perreaut described conditions in Gaza as “apocalyptic”, saying living conditions at the Al-Aqsa Hospital she’s working from “can barely be described as living conditions anymore.” 

“The healthcare system is completely collapsed at the moment,” Perreaut told Al Jazeera.

The UN World Food Programme reports that half of Gaza’s population is now starving due to Israeli siege warfare and the collapse of civilian infrastructure. In northern Gaza that figure goes up to nine in ten.

All of this aligns perfectly with Israeli policies of massive forced evacuations, attacking healthcare facilities, and laying complete siege to the Gaza Strip.

A doctor named Hafez Abukhoussa writes the following in a new article for Time titled “What I’ve Seen Treating Patients in Gaza’s Remaining Hospitals”:

Gaza’s health care system has almost completely collapsed as a result of Israel’s ongoing bombardment. Hospitals and ambulances have been repeatedly attacked. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 250 medical workers have been killed so far, including two of my colleagues from Doctors Without Borders, who died while performing their duties in Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza. Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 11 are still functioning in any capacity, according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals in the north like Al-Shifa are barely functioning at all, as basic medicines and fuel have run out. My colleagues have been performing amputations by flashlight and without anesthesia. When Israeli soldiers raided Al-Shifa a few weeks ago — a move the head of the WHO called ‘totally unacceptable’ — doctors and staff were forced to abandon patients too sick or injured to evacuate. Some of those who refused to leave, including the hospital’s director, were arrested, alongside dozens of others. At Al-Nasr Children’s hospital, soldiers ordered staff to leave the patients, including four premature babies who required oxygen, who were later found dead.”

This all also aligns perfectly with the Netanyahu government’s reported agenda to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum,” and with all the other calls for ethnic cleansing we keep seeing pushed by Israeli officials and thought leaders over and over again.

It also aligns perfectly with the suggestions made last month by an influential Israeli national security leader named Giora Eiland, a retired major general for the IDF.

“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics,” Eiland wrote. “We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.”

Eiland was completely dismissive of the idea that there are innocent people in Gaza, a sentiment we’re seeing pushed harder and harder as Israel draws nearer and nearer to a very, very dark chapter in the history of human civilization.

“They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th,” Eiland wrote, adding, “Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.”

“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism,” Eiland adds. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

When people talk about genocide in Gaza, they’re not just talking about the thousands of civilians who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes. The policies Israel has been deliberately putting in place have the potential to kill many, many more people than that in the coming months, and if Netanyahu and his goons get their way, that’s exactly what will happen.

December 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Civilian deaths in Gaza highest of all world conflicts in 20th Century, including World Wars, Israeli study reveals

 https://www.sott.net/article/486726-Civilian-deaths-in-Gaza-highest-of-all-world-conflicts-in-20th-Century-including-World-Wars-Israeli-study-reveals 10 Dec 23

The Guardian newspaper saysThe aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years, a study published by an Israeli newspaper has found.

The analysis by Haaretz came as Israeli forces fought to consolidate their control of northern Gaza on Saturday, bombing the Shejaiya district of Gaza City, while also conducting airstrikes on Rafah, a town on the southern border with Egypt where the Israeli army has told people in Gaza to take shelter.

The full death toll from the past 24 hours was unclear but the main hospital in central Gaza, at Deir al-Balah, reported it received 71 bodies, and 62 bodies were taken to Nasser hospital in the main southern city of Khan Younis, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

The Haaretz analysis found that in three earlier campaigns in Gaza, in the period from 2012-22, the ratio of civilian deaths to the total of those killed in airstrikes hovered around 40%. That ratio declined to 33% in a bombing campaign earlier this year, called Operation Shield and Arrow.

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Haaretz described as “unprecedented killing”. The ratio is significantly higher than the civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead.

Comment: Andalou Agency, quoting the Palestinian Health Ministry – whose figures have repeatedly been shown by independent agencies to be accurate – report the following:

The Palestinian death toll from the ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip has mounted to 17,177 since Oct. 7, the Health Ministry in the enclave said Thursday.

“Around 70% of the victims are children and women,” ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra told a press conference.

He said 46,000 other people were injured in the Israeli onslaught on the blockaded Palestinian territory.

“At least 290 medics were killed, 102 ambulances destroyed and 160 health care centers targeted in the Israeli attacks, while 20 hospitals and 46 primary care centers were forced out of service,” al-Qudra said.

“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Haaretz concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.”

Comment: This reaction by even the Israeli press perhaps reveals why Israel, and those facilitating the genocide in the US, and UK, are escalating the slaughter and destruction, because it’s only a matter of time before unrest at home, and a response from those abroad, will hamper their nefarious agenda.

It also serves to distract from the rapidly deteriorating situation in their own economies and societies, whilst at the same time setting the Middle East alight which, they seem to think, will provide justification for their sinister actions.

The figures will make uneasy reading for the Biden administration, which is facing global criticism and isolation for vetoing a UN security council vote for a ceasefire on Friday.

Since the start of the war, triggered by the deadly 7 October attack on Israel by Hamas, the US has been seeking to persuade Israeli forces to be more discriminate in choosing targets, and has repeatedly claimed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are “receptive” to American advice, despite the consistently high civilian death toll.

Comment: The Guardian has been exposed as being compromised by the UK’s intelligence agencies, and that’s perhaps one reason why it fails to mention that strong evidence, along with logic, has since revealed that not only was the attack known about well in advance; the IDF was forced to stand down; that Israel was responsible for killing a significant number of its own people; as well as destroying evidence.

The US national security spokesperson, John Kirby, repeated that claim while briefing reporters on Air Force One on Friday, but added: “We certainly all recognise more can be done to try to reduce civilian casualties, and we’re going to keep working with our Israeli counterparts to that end.”

Kirby was speaking as the Biden administration faced allegations of abetting war crimes for vetoing the security council resolution.

Human Rights Watch said the US risked “complicity in war crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic support. Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said: “With this veto, the US government is shamefully turning its back on immense civilian suffering, a staggering death toll, and unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.”

Comment: In a vote for a ceasefire at the UN today, the US voted against, the UK abstained, the rest of the UN voted for:

The Saudi foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, met the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in Washington on Friday night to maintain pressure for “urgent steps” to establish a ceasefire so humanitarian aid could be delivered.

In the face of the global criticism, US officials stressed the role the US has played in pushing for humanitarian deliveries to Gaza through the Rafah crossing point. Kirby said a US military transport plane had landed in Egypt on Friday carrying nearly 26,000kg (57,000lbs) of food, water, and medicine bound for Gaza.

Comment: Meanwhile the US & UK also provides the weapons, the funds, and the veto powers, without which there would be no need for them to send humanitarian aid.

“We’re certainly mindful of the suffering of the people of Gaza, and we’re doing everything we can to not just get stuff in there but to lead an actual international effort to get stuff in there,” he said.

Kirby said fewer than 100 trucks had crossed through the Rafah gate on Friday, about half the daily volume that entered Gaza during a week-long humanitarian ceasefire at the end of last month.

“Obviously that’s not at the level that we want it to be at,” he said, noting that Israel was preparing to open an additional inspection facility at Kerem Shalom on the Israel-Gaza border, which is expected to ease the most significant bottleneck, inspection capacity.

However, the UN and other aid agencies say that even when trucks enter the Gaza Strip at Rafah, the ground offensive in southern Gaza and the general lack of security is preventing the supplies from being distributed, at a time of a high and rising threat of starvation and disease.

Comment: The UN has also sounded the alarm that 130 of their own staff have been murdered; that their staff are taking their children with them to work in the hopes that, if they can’t be safe at home, they can at least ‘die together’.

They’re also warning that, with the conditions in Gaza being so dire – with 700 people sharing 1 toilet and 25 babies a day being born with little medical supplies – it won’t be long before disease and viral outbreaks ravage those that managed to escape the death from above:

The IDF said it had failed in a hostage rescue attempt on Friday. The chief spokesperson, R Adm Daniel Hagari, said: “The forces raided a Hamas site and eliminated terrorists who had taken part in the abduction and captivity of hostages.”

He said two Israeli soldiers had been seriously wounded in the mission, and no hostages had been rescued. He did not confirm Hamas claims that one hostage, 25-year-old Sahar Baruch, had been killed in the rescue attempt, but his home kibbutz at Be’eri announced Baruch had died.

Comment: See also: Israel’s ground war conundrum

December 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment