Atrocities with US blessing: Our responsibility in Palestine
In the wake of a terrorist killing spree in Israel in which Hamas slaughtered some 1,400 people, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved… They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” It was widely regarded as a deeply unfair assessment, used to justify Israel’s ensuing, brutal military campaign and mass-scale murder of the people of Gaza.
But there is a kernel of wisdom in what Herzog said. It ought to be incumbent upon free people to reign in their governments, to keep them from committing atrocities and to punish them when they do. The people of Gaza, though, can hardly be said to be free. They are governed by militant Islamic extremists and simultaneously ground down by Israel, deprived of land, property, and economic and social rights. They are among the most oppressed people on earth.
Herzog’s statement begs the question, though: What’s our excuse?
War crimes, atrocities, and ethnic cleansing…
Gaza right now is home to one of the greatest humanitarian crises on earth. Israel has all but declared war against the entire population, killing hundreds of people daily and committing war crimes that have captured the world’s attention.
It started with a total siege of Gaza. The 140-square-mile region, home to about 2 million Palestinians, was already cut off from the rest of the world. Israel’s latest escalation of the long-running siege blocked the entry of food, water, medicine, and fuel. They also cut off electricity, which elevates the risk of water contamination and disease, prevents Gazans from storing their many corpses in morgues, endangers anyone who needs medical care, and sharply restricts the flow of information, making it difficult to know what’s really going on there.
Israel claims the siege is part of its campaign to rout Hamas, the leading political authority in Gaza since their takeover in 2007. But it is already having a devasting impact on the entire population. Only after much outcry did Israel allow humanitarian aid to enter from Egypt.
After implementing the siege, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the evacuation of 1 million Gazans, half the region’s population, from the north of the strip to the south. A ruinous and apparently indiscriminate bombing campaign soon followed. Israeli shells have flattened buildings, mosques and entire villages. Since bombing began two weeks ago, about 3,800 Gazans have reportedly been killed — including about one child every 15 minutes. Israel even bombed the evacuation routes it ordered fleeing Gazans to take.
Human Rights Watch recently reported that Israel has also used white phosphorous airbursts over Gaza. White phosphorous munitions blanket the area with an extremely hot-burning chemical, setting fire to buildings and severely burning anyone it touches, causing fatalities, lifelong injuries and respiratory issues. Using white phosphorous over a densely populated area like Gaza, according to HRW, “violates the international humanitarian law prohibition on putting civilians at unnecessary risk.”
Perhaps the most serious single incident yet, however, came on October 16, when an explosion at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza caused some 500 deaths. Israel denies responsibility, and US intelligence recently suggested the explosion was caused by an errant rocket from a faction called the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Most of the mainstream US media quickly adopted the narrative. But the jury is still out. There are many reasons not to trust the official story, and neither Israel nor US intelligence are above lying to absolve themselves of a potential war crime.
Whether Israel is responsible for the hospital bombing or not, they have a serious credibility problem on the issue because it’s precisely the kind of thing they’ve repeatedly threatened to do. The language of Israel and its hawkish supporters has been dehumanizing and barely short of genocidal. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Far-right commentator Ben Shapiro tweeted, “[M]orality requires that those who rape women and kidnap children must be eradicated, not negotiated with” — which may sound reasonable until you realize that propagandists like him regularly equate all Gazans with such behaviors.
…funded by the US taxpayer
Our tax dollars prop up the Israeli military. That military is now carrying out what numerous international human rights observers are decrying as war crimes and a possible prelude to ethnic cleansing. Our political and media leaders, including President Biden, have pledged their unwavering support. This week, Biden called for a significant boost in military aid to Israel. The US vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a humanitarian pause in Gaza and urging the protection of civilian lives.
By Herzog’s logic, we are all at least partly culpable for these myriad atrocities. Frankly, he’s not all the way wrong.
Where is our resistance? Why aren’t we stepping up, with all means at our disposal, to put a stop to the bloodshed? And if, in Herzog’s moral view, the Gazans deserve everything they’re getting in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorism, what will we deserve if we do nothing to halt — or at the very least, end our support of — the systematic displacement and slaughter of 2 million people?
Some relief may come from the fact that Israel has so grossly overplayed its hand, giving the world so many horrific scenes of violence, that international pressure may force them to slow down. That may already be happening. We should be applying that pressure ourselves and demanding that our government does the same.
We have freedom of speech and protest, and we should be using it. We must never lose our moral compass, never look away from something ugly because it’s far away or happening to people we don’t like anyway. Every second that we’re not doing something to stop this tragedy, we are tacitly supporting it. As we learned on 9/11 — and as the people of Israel and Palestine well know — innocent people all too often pay the price for their government’s wrongdoings.
Cutting through the propaganda, changing the narrative, and forcing the state to take moral actions feels overwhelming. An acorn thrown at a battleship doesn’t do anything — but a million of them will at least get someone to notice, and might even make a dent.
