The latest phase of slaughter and seizure on the part of Israeli forces in Gaza has commenced. Following relentless airstrikes that have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, Operation Gideon’s Chariots is now in full swing, begun even as Israel and Hamas concluded a second day of ceasefire talks in Doha. The intention, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, is to expand “operational control” in the Strip while seeking to free the remaining Israeli hostages. In the process, it hopes to achieve what has, to date, been much pie in the sky: defeating Hamas and seizing control of the enclave.
The mendacious pattern of the IDF and Netanyahu government has become clearer than ever. It comes in instalments, much like a distasteful fashion show. The opening begins with unequivocal, hot denial: famine is not taking place, and any aid to Gaza has been looted by the Hamas authorities; civilians were not targeted, let alone massacred; aid workers were not butchered but legitimately killed as they had Hamas militants among them. And there is no ethnic cleansing and genocide to speak of. To claim otherwise was antisemitic.
Then comes the large dollop of corrective, inconvenient reality, be it a film, a blatant statement, or some item of damning evidence. The next stage is one of quibbles and qualifications: Gaza will receive some necessaries; there is a humanitarian crisis, because we were told by the United States, our main sponsor, that this was the case; and there might have been some cases where civilians were killed, a problem easily rectified by an internal investigation by the military.
Just prior to the latest assault, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in leaked quotes, revealed another dark purpose of the new military operation. “We are destroying more and more homes. They have no nowhere to return to,” he said in testimony before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside the Gaza Strip.” Here was a state official’s declaration of intent to ethnically cleanse a population.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was even blunter, something praised by Netanyahu. Israel’s objective, he revealed in a statement on March 19, was to destroy “everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip.” What was currently underway involved “conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed.”
The Netanyahu government has also added another twist to the ghastly performance. On March 18, the provision of various “basic” forms of humanitarian aid into Gaza was announced. The measure was approved by a security cabinet meeting pressed by concerns from military officials warning that food supplies from UN sources and other aid groups had run out. The pressure had also come from, in Netanyahu’s words in a March 19 video address, Israel’s “greatest friends in the world”, the trying sort who claimed that there was “‘one thing we cannot stand. We cannot accept images of hunger, mass hunger. We cannot stand that. We will not be able to support you’.” How inconveniently squeamish of them.
That same day, United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said nine aid trucks had been cleared by Israeli authorities to enter Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem crossing. This was an absurd, ineffectual number, given the 500 trucks or more that entered Gaza prior to October 2023.
Fanatics who subscribe to the ethnic cleansing, rid-of-Palestine school were understandably disappointed, even at this obscenely modest provision of aid. “Any humanitarian aid that enters the Strip… will fuel Hamas and give it oxygen while our hostages languish in tunnels,” moaned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. “We must crush Hamas, not simultaneously give it oxygen.” He also wished that Netanyahu “explain to our friends in the White House the implications of this ‘aid’, which only prolongs the war and delays our victory and the return of all our hostages.”
Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, also of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, was in a similar mood, making the farcical resumption of aid sound like criminal salvation for a savage people. “This is our tragedy with Netanyahu’s approach. A leader who could have led to a clear victory and be remembered as the one who defeated radical Islam but who time after time let this historic opportunity slip away. Letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory and is another obstacle to the release of the hostages.”
The picture emerging from Israel’s latest mission of carnage is one of murderous dysfunction. It made little sense to Knesset member Moshe Saada, for instance, that a broader, ever more lethal offensive was in the offing with five new IDF divisions even as aid was being provided. This was implicitly telling. Did Palestinian civilians matter in so far as they should be fed, even as they were being butchered and encouraged into fleeing?
The extent of the horror has now reached the point where it is being acknowledged in the capitals of Israel’s close allies. A joint statement from the UK, France and Canada affirmed opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was wholly inadequate in the face of “intolerable” human suffering. Denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip “is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”
For much time, the notion of consciously eliminating the Palestinian presence in Gaza, through starvation, massacre and displacement, was confined to the racial, ethnoreligious fringes of purist lunacy typified by Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Their vocal presence and frank advocacy have now made that ambition a grotesque, ongoing reality.
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Its time to acknowledge that the Balfour experiment is a failure.
The idea of allowing European Jews to take space in Palestine, on the condition that they would share the land is now proven to be false.
They will steal, but sharing is not in their nature.
The big question is whether they they still have the right to defend as a nation, because they are rogue, and do not conform to any of the criterium that we attaché to nations who are part of the civilized west.
The Balfour Declaration was not a failure. The immigrant Zionists failed to follow the principle of the document and the British mandate failed to prevent the Zionists settlers from unleashing unprovoked violence on the resident Palestinians. The World failed the whole project when it allowed the formation of Israel and then failed again (as it still does) to bring the Zionists to justice.
It is not just Gaza, it is also the West Bank, as eyes are averted, the continued repression of Palestinians and Bedouins in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are being persecuted for not being Jews. They are human, just as the Jews are human. Just as all people are human. Let’s not allow ‘othering’ by people being perceived as different, or ‘not like us’.
But to say that is antisemitic????? Or is it a fight for humanitarianism, that all lives are human lives, there is no difference.
We need the freedom to stand up for a humanitarian resolution in Israel/Palestine.
The most important thing that needs to happen is to break the strangle hold the US has in the UN Security Council where any form of protest to what Israel is up to is blocked, rendering the voice of the US (and the other members of the Security Council when it suits) greater that that of the General Assembly.
For too long Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank have been allowed through the silencing of the majority voices.
Two very good documentaries : the first by Mark Thomas many years ago called “Walking the Wall” explored the appalling circumstances and physically enforced deprivation and division between Israel and occupied Western Bank. the second is the newest Louis Theroux documentary exposing much of the same as well as how strongly these Zionists believe they should own all and every segment of the West Bank and also Gaza.
If any resistance to this subjugation – they are called “Terrorists”.
If bombing hospitals , schools, refugee centres and civilians and murder by the occupying force by starvation , it’s now called “defence”. What in the ‘down the rabbit hole’ could be made sense of this? When I see those skeletal children holding out bowls for food, I see a strong resemblance to those horrific photos of what horrors were perpetrated upon Jewish people. The only thing missing is the blue striped clothing.
I am an humanitarian. I am not antisemitic.
I believe that the Israeli government feel they can openly slaughter innocent people because the world’s governments are terrified of being called ‘antisemitic.’ Netanyahu is a war criminal and Ben Gvir and Smotrich are keeping him in power – and they want to annihilate – totally – Palestine for Zionistic weird beliefs from the Old Testament or ‘The Torah’ , or whatever.
The American Voice should be deactivated in the UN. America is largely responsible for the slaughter and genocide of an entire people.
I see that Trump is taking in South African farmers who are allegedly facing genocide in their homeland. The question is, will he extend a humanitarian hand to Palestinians facing genocide in Gaza?
Surely ethnicity and skin colour would not be a guiding principle in Trump’s humanitarian deliberations?
In the typical style of the ‘West’, hyped to utter fascism by America, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, omission, corruption and secrecy are were their hallmarks. Particularly since America’s manufactured hubris since WWII.
The crusty old elites, despite the increase of access to history’s truths, continue their stream of arrogant BS, and concealment of the true cause and objective of at least the last 500 years of their mass destruction, murder and race-baiting – the true cause, christo-fascism, jealousy, rivalry and greed of and by the elites. The true objectives, to control all of the world and extract all its bounty via any means so as to increase their wealth and power. They have invested in their castles in the air and weaponry and all the ways and means to build these arcane devices.
To achieve a continuum, they inculcate their progeny, first and foremost, then by gathering the supremos of religion and the aspirational fourth estate, facilitate a collaboration of corruption and aggrandizement. Together they smash nature’s real world inter-dependencies, and supplant them with abstractions and sophistry to create an ontology that only serves them, whilst subjugating, providing bling and debt-traps to ordinary folk. If not for the gentle sciences, academia and arts, who knows where the political elites would have steered the world already?
They continue by the mischief of precedence, and the flexible and convenient device of ‘sovereignty’ to make rules as ‘law’, particularly pertaining to real property and resource ownership (to the exclusion of ‘others’) to do with as they will (usually a ‘Constitution’), with all other ‘laws’ descendant – particularly commercial law which is typically riven with loopholes. There’s even ‘unlawful killing’ as opposed to what? ‘Justifiable homicide’, which includes, in the case of war, legitimate casus belli – how convenient! And surrounding all these things is a framework of mind-blowing financialization.
This is our inheritance, until it becomes our capture. And whether it becomes our capture, depends upon the interplay of states. After serial obliterations, there was the establishment of the League of Nations, then the United Nations. Both formed in an attempt to delineate the status quo regardless of it being being determined by the same old elites. It may have have heralded a set of international ‘rules’, but there were many detractors and usurpers. And it did not account for the rise of depots. Conversely it gave rise to a ramping of militarization for the purpose of coercion rather than diplomacy – the elites would not let go.
The ‘West’ including, in particular the new America maintained an age old trade blockage against Russia (USSR), before and after the Russian dissolution of the USSR, and also maintained its age old intent to control trade in, to and from the ‘East’ (and ‘South’). The so-called UN internationalization instruments gave cover for the western imposition of the ‘ersatz Israel’ on Palestine and the Palestinians, after its earlier and ongoing concordance with political Zionism.
Increasingly, as the elites of the ‘West’ depleted their own countries socially, economically and environmentally, to feed their feckless greed they turned their trade and military hegemons to the North (Russia), and (via Israel) to the Levant and Central Asia as gateways to the ‘East’.
As the EU continued its formation, it remained hushed, albeit the extreme Britain exited. Meanwhile the arrogant and exceptionist America demurred from key tenets and rules of the ever developing UN, causing blockages in its universal development, and horrendous vetos in the UNSC, preferring its own unilateral incursions.
America’s unilateralism has seen it stack up horrendous destruction and losses in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (and other more covert exercises). Losses to the extent that its reputation is blown and in its own losses, its economy is in tatters.
It has been hoist by its own peddling of divisive xenophobia, and now because of the breeding of jurisdiction-jumping mega-corps, it only has left xenophobia and bombs by which to vainly cling to power. It no longer has an available ‘enemy’. It can do nothing about the rise of China and India, and has ignored Africa, the oil-rich Arab states are playing it like a limp fish.
All America has left is its two pawns. The involuntary Ukraine (with the crumbling bogey of NATO), and the willing and lunatic Netanyahu / Likud Israel.
With the advent of the depotic T-Rump, political America is running amok, and its people will suffer. Its even trying to obliterate the UN. Such desperate perversity has at least awakened the rest of the political world, who are at last making noises of discontent, working to stop American madness and proxy wars, whilst at the same time hoping to avert global economic and environmental collapse.
So much for olde worlde Constitutions, sovereignty and the rule of law. In the ‘West’ (incl America), it needs a thorough rework so it serves ordinary folk and their communities at its foundation, as opposed to the greedy elites and their flunkies. As apparently there is no such thing as noblesse oblige.
Of course, all this genocidal criminality is keeping Bibi the Butcher out gaol for all his other corruption.Hell should be a reality for these animals.