Israel’s Untenable Regime
December 7, 2024—Israel’s racist, genocidal war is now its second year of a calculated mass murder of an ancient people who have been dealing with occupation of their land for centuries. Israel calls them “human animals.” Like all settler-colonial states seeking dominance over another human ethnicity, Israel must de-humanize its opponent in order to (barely) be able to defend itself in human company. This is obviously not working very well for Israel, as countries all over the world are denouncing it, and thousands of Jewish Israelis left the country in October, and have not returned.
Also, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has actually gotten around to writing up some arrest warrants against key Israeli officials. It took six months after the prosecutor filed applications for arrest warrants for the court to act, charging Prime Minister Netanyahu and defense minister Gallant with war crimes and crimes against humanity. And then when it did, the court included warrants for three Hamas leaders as well. So, we know in advance who, if anyone, will see the inside of a prison or face an executioner, if Israel is not abolished first.
Israeli government: lock ’em up
There is no doubt that Netanyahu and Gallant and accomplices are criminals who should be locked up and sent across the River Styx to drop dead in Hades. A large number of ICC member states have said they support the ICC and would carry out the arrests. Of course, this would require these war criminals to show up within the borders of the arresting state, which obviously is a pipe dream. ICC arrest warrants for President Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova Belova of Russia have been floating around in an office somewhere for 20 months now and counting.
Some time ago, I would have said that there is no nation in this U.S.-dominated capitalist/imperialist world that will actually risk their neck to serve the warrants even if these perpetrators do leave Israel for anywhere that is not the U.S. Now, however, there is a gradual weakening of U.S. domination, and I’m not so sure; maybe one or more EU nation might act with charges. Even so, the U.S. would condemn it, ignore it, and keep on sending the billions that Israel needs to pursue its daily killing rate, while Biden whines about how Palestinians are being treated badly, but does nothing about it.
The orange blob will make things worse
And there is no end in sight. When that great, burbling orange blob sits himself down to watch TV in the White House this coming January, Gallant and Netanyahu will continue to have nothing to worry about. The U.S. treasury will stay open for them. But while ICC charges achieve nothing on the ground, their existence is a loud-horn warning to the world that these crimes are there, who is committing them, and who is paying for them. And that is not nothing.
Certainly, the Israeli mass murderers are not batting an eye over the ICC ruling. On the first of October this year, their forces threw gas on the fire by storming into Lebanon to destroy Hezbollah, the militia group that dominates in most of Lebanon and is an ally to Hamas (both of which are supported by Iran.) Hezbollah had shown its solidarity with Hamas by bombing Israel starting right after the October 7th attack on Israel last year. From October 8, 2023 to the 20th of September 2024, Hezbollah has launched 1,900 cross border attacks.
It goes almost without saying in this lopsided “war” in which Israel bombed Hezbollah/Lebanon with more than 8,000 bombs in the same time period, using the same 2,000-pound Bunker Buster bombs it uses to kill families and destroy homes and infrastructure in Gaza. In September of this year, Israel also went on a campaign to kill Hezbollah leadership and succeeded in killing Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and other leaders in air strikes.
Israel invades Lebanon
Then, on October 1, Israel invaded Lebanon complete with more massive bombings, including in the residential area of South in the Dahieh suburb in south Beirut, where many Hezbollah members live with their families. By the time a ceasefire had been virtually forced on Israel in negotiations with the U.S. and France, Israel had caused a death toll of 3,800 Lebanese armed and unarmed people at the expense of just 100 Israeli soldiers, (as reported in the New York Times on November 30th.) Considering these numbers in Israel’s favor, the statement by Mahmoud Qamati, Deputy Head of Hezbollah’s Political Council, that the conflict was a “victory” for Hezbollah, is very hard to believe.
And it wasn’t just the death toll. The 60-day ceasefire agreement requires Hezbollah to be de-militarized and forced to move back from the border across the Litani River (which roughly divides South from North Lebanon,) while its infrastructure in the South is destroyed. Who knows what happens to Hezbollah members’ families who live there. And what about Hezbollah’s bombing in solidarity with Hamas? Probably can’t happen now. Although Hamas praised Hezbollah for its efforts, in reality, I think they just lost an ally.
Israel, the “capo”
Whatever the issue with its neighbors, Israel always sees itself as the capo. Unless the top boss in Washington DC closes the curtain (which he won’t do,) Israel is allowed to break the ceasefire at will apparently, and it started doing that in the days just after the signing. It is allowed to make military strikes into Lebanon if it detects Hezbollah military activity there. This would allow Israel to indulge in its favorite tactic—lying. It is not a ceasefire if it allows the number one signatory to break it on the basis of its own determination that the number two signatory is breaking it!
In one case, apparently a few people were seen reoccupying their homes in Southern Lebanon. Israeli forces fired on them, then made an angry statement that Hezbollah must stay above the Litani River. Whether these people were Hezbollah or not, this was not a military threat to Israel. The way Israel and the U.S. are going, this ceasefire could be history in a matter of days.
Meanwhile, Gaza is still being systematically demolished, depriving the people of essential infrastructure and services such as hospitals, schools, clean water, sewers, and their own homes. Reports of atrocities committed by Israel pore in every day. Israeli sharpshooters were aiming from a distance to kill babies and young children who happen to be outside playing. Two young boys were crushed to death in a crowd that was trying to get at some of the supplies from a truck. Entire families were killed in one bombing of a home or encampment. Badly wounded young men who might have been saved could not be because the hospital lacked needed meds or supplies. Many deaths at a hospital are buried in a hastily dug trench outside, and some bodies are so mutilated that they are unrecognizable by their families. And people are starved to death as food shipments have been reduced to the lowest levels yet.
Israel supports the gangs of Gaza
As if the people of Gaza don’t have enough trouble as it is, murderous gangs, made up largely of criminals who escaped after the war started, have found a way to loot UN aid convoys coming in and selling the goods for outrageous prices. In the last couple of months, they have grown from a handful of thieves into heavily armed gangs in the hundreds working mainly around the south-eastern entry point of Kerem Shalom. One large looted convey was carrying enough flour to bake bread for two thirds of the population for a week. The gangs sold these stolen supplies for a huge profit.
The gangs stop trucks from coming in by shooting out the tires, capturing the drivers and removing the goods, along with the truck’s gas for good measure. Israeli tanks are posted close by to observe the goings on daily. Gaza’s head of the private transport association, Nahed Shohaybr, has been forced to turn down UN delivery requests after multiple drivers with his company were killed by looters, and half his fleet of 50 trucks were damaged. The Israeli observers did nothing. “Why don’t those tanks attack them?” Shohabyr demands. He notes that, “for the military, this is a good way of indirectly starving Gaza.”
Within days, only about a third of Gaza’s population was receiving what was left of this load of flour, and within a couple more days, the UN Relief and Works Agency—UNRWA—had to abandon the Kerem Shalom opening because of these criminals. Now, because of this and Israel’s other measures to prevent aid getting in, Gaza is closer than ever to starvation, particularly in the north.
Stray dogs eat bodies in the streets
According to a report by the Electronic Intifada, 1400 families have been killed—no survivors—and hundreds more have only one person left alive to remember them. There are numerous places in Gaza where bodies are buried that are totally unknown as to who they were. Stray dogs are digging up and eating bodies in the streets. Three more aid workers for World Central Kitchen have been killed as of this writing, despite being in clearly marked vehicles. And Gaza Soup Kitchen chef, Mahmoud Almadhoun, was killed by an Israeli Drone.
All of these killings are clearly not Hamas operatives, as Israel claims, but people going about their lives, helping others. Chef Mahmoud for instance wrote letters to friends in the U.S. in which he always greeted Americans with a friendly shout-out, according to his older brother who was interviewed on Democracy Now! (December 2.)
The fate of Palestinians in the West Bank is better than it is in Gaza, but still devastating and getting worse. A Jewish American woman, Kate Raphael, of Seattle, who has visited the West Bank twice described her observations to Dennis Bernstein on Flashpoints, KPFA Radio (November 29.) Raphael visited the West Bank 20 years ago and again just recently. She describes a severe difference in the mood of the Palestinians there: “…the smiling hopefulness as people went about their business has slowed down considerably. The people are under constant fear of attack.”
West Bank settlers rage on
In recent years, Netanyahu’s fascist government, led in the West Bank by cabinet member Itamar Ben-Gvir, has ramped up the numbers and the aggressiveness of the settlers. They are organized into military formation to conduct daily attacks on the people, destroying their homes and pushing them toward the eastern border relentlessly. These settlers, many of whom hail from the U.S., attack the people, the villages and their houses daily. They make sure people do not have the necessary permits to build, or re-build homes that have been attacked. Or, if the person does have a permit, they refuse to allow construction anyway.
The settlers often harass the people with offensive pettiness: an 80-year-old woman owns a small olive grove where she and a helper have come to pick the olives, for which she has the correct permit. Israeli settler guards refuse to accept her permit or let her onto her property. They force her to leave, saying, “come back another day by yourself.” She is old and needs her helper, but the Israelis don’t listen.
Palestinians don’t exist.
Kate Raphael is able to conduct some frank conversations with the settler patrollers. She asks what they are doing there and why do they persecute the Palestinians? If a Palestinian asked such questions themselves, the settler thugs would reply with threats and terror. Damages and even total destruction of people’s homes and villages is always possible. For Raphael, as a Jewish American, the replies come in respectful tones, but the answers smell of deep ethnic cleansing just the same. Palestinians (who have lived there for 4,000 years,) “do not belong here.” They are “occupying our land,” and somehow, “they don’t exist.”
Wait, who is “occupying” somebody else’s land? And who are the people that “do not exist?” Palestinians have occupied their land for four thousand years, surviving many occupations along the way with their identity always remaining intack. It was European imperialists and their hangers-on that invented the idea that Palestinians didn’t exist, or if they did, they “didn’t belong there.”
The crimes that Israel commits on Gaza and Palestine, are known worldwide for being genocide to an extent Israel has not done before, despite its many brutal wars in such a relatively short time of its existence as an invading entity in Palestine. Israel has been involved in 19 wars and related military operations starting in 1948. This number includes wars directly started by Israel, Intifadas in reply by Palestinians, and other military operations none of which would never have happened had Israel not been there making trouble.
And that gets us to the reason Israel was there in the first place. It is widely known that Israel is a colonial settler state, and that it is waging a genocidal war on Palestine; that its aim is to drive Palestinians out of Palestine so that it can settle on their land. But questions still abound: why, doesn’t Israel “settle” just by living side by side with the indigenous inhabitants? It’s not as though this would have been impossible. Jews have been doing just that for thousands of years, albeit with varying numbers and lots of moving around, including to Europe.
No wars over religion with the Ottomans
It must be emphasized here that there has never been a safer place on the planet for those of the Jewish faith over its thousands of years than the Arab Middle East, Ottoman Empire and Palestine. Never. European medieval, capitalist and imperialist society developed antisemitism, the Papal Inquisition, fascism, the Holocaust, and Zionism. And therein lies the problem.
Here are a few examples: During the infamous Papal Inquisition in Spain in the fifteenth century, the kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella expelled every single Jewish person in Spain, right down to Isabella’s personal servant, in order to “purify” the Christian state. Of the mass of refugees forced out of Spain, the majority found refuge in the Ottoman Empire despite how far away that was. (Some others found refuge in the Italian Peninsula and Sicily.) Families descended from these refugees from the Spanish Inquisition had thriving communities in the Middle East for centuries.
At the time Zionism was becoming an organized plan in the late 1800s, Palestine was a state in the Ottoman Empire, and that meant freedom of religion. The Ottoman Empire, which spanned from the 14th to the early 20th century, was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious entity. It was predominantly Muslim, but it also included large Christian and Jewish communities. As with provinces in the Empire, these communities were generally left alone—pay your taxes and you’re good to go. This tradition of religious tolerance went back centuries. This was in stark contrast to the religious wars and persecutions that were common in Europe during the same period.
Imperialist states in Europe simply dismissed the Ottomans and Palestinians as backward and useless, while at the same time detesting Jews. Despite this arrogant ignorance, several Prime Ministers of Britain mentioned the idea of dealing with the “Jewish Problem” by shipping them off to Palestine. A Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl took this thought a step further by writing a book called Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), published in 1896. This quickly led to three Zionist conferences in the next several years.
The plan: ethnic cleansing on steroids
That the Zionist plan for a Jewish state in Palestine was absolutely clear about the fact that it required the removal of the centuries-long existence of the indigenous population. This wasn’t just a plan for Jews to migrate to someone else’s country, it was a plan to steal someone else’s country, by grabbing the land and throwing the inhabitants out. Herzl was clear about this, in private at first in his diary and letters, and with typical settler-colonial rubbish about how colonization was going to “help” the indigenous people.
A prominent Palestinian of the time, Yusuf Diya al-Din Pasha al-Khalidi (Yusuf Diya for short,) was an internationally educated Ottoman government official who knew of Herzl and respected him; but ripped his plan apart, albeit in a respectful tone. In a letter to Herzl, he predicted that the Zionist idea would sow dissensions among Christians, Muslims and Jews there, and “It would imperil the status and security that Jews had always enjoyed throughout the Ottoman domains.” Most importantly, he said that “Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.” It was “pure folly” to take over Palestine, so “let Palestine be left alone.” Every single one of Yusuf Diya’s predictions came true.
Ottomans out, Zionists in
Herzl made a response to this letter which completely ignored all of Yusuf Diya’s points and is not worth the paper it was written on. Herzl, and soon to be successor Chaim Weizmann, pushed ahead with Zionism looking for a sponsor. The timing was good, since the imperialists were heading rapidly into a world war and competing for potential colonies to capture and profit from. Britain and France signed the top-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 in which they divided up targets for colonization with France getting Syria and Britain Palestine. Herzl and Weizmann sealed a deal with Britain in which the Zionist organization became an ally, thus providing the promise of a new population that would be loyal to its imperialist ally. The Balfour Declaration—announced by Britain the following year—solidified the deal, promising a home to the Jews without even naming the Palestinians they would replace.
The pressure put on the Ottoman Empire from both the Balkan Wars of the 1870s to 1913, the world war, and the pressure of its provinces were pushing toward national identities just as the war ended. Palestinians organized and demanded nationhood after the war, as did their neighbors, but the British occupiers squelched them and moved the Zionist settlers in as the Ottoman Empire faded from history.
The world turns
World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire marked a turning point when the relatively peaceful Middle East was replaced with interventions and violence coming, in the main, from Europe. The Balkan wars, also due to aggression from Europe, were just an introduction of what was ahead for the region. The troubles and conflicts were due to several perpetrators, but Israel was the worst by far.
Let’s look at the big picture. Palestinians have been here for four thousand years. If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider that Palestinians as a people were using the name “Palestine” in the Late Bronze Age. That is about 1300 BCE (Before the Common Era) onward. The name is evident in countless histories, as Palestinian writer Nur Masalha explains in Palestine, A Four Thousand Year History, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2021. There are Abbasid inscriptions from the ancient world, Islamic numismatic evidence maps, and Philistine coins from the Iron Age. From late antiquity through the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic eras, Palestine acquired official administrative status.
Israel, on the other hand, came out of the European conquering and colonizing period, not to colonize, but to replace this ancient Palestinian culture and populace by whatever means necessary, including the genocidal violence we see today. Some commentators and journalists are very critical of what Israel is doing today, yet still say that “Israel has the right of self-defense.” Why? It is a lawless, criminal entity committing an equally criminal endeavor. It is not needed to protect Jews (and never was.) I have no qualms about concluding that Israel must be abolished, and its murderous, fascist government locked up. Of course, the innocent Jews in this miserable state should be and will be accepted as residents of Palestine (hopefully a socialist Palestine) as Jews always have been before they were bitten by the killer snake of Zionism.