U.S. and Israel: The Terrorists of the Century
June 7, 2024—“Death to Arabs,” shouted the flag-waving Israelis on their annual “Jerusalem Day” (June 5th) march through the Damascus Gate—Old City area of Jerusalem that is historically Palestinian. “We are delivering a message from here to Hamas,” declared Israel’s fascist National Security Secretary, Itamar Ben-Gvir, “Damascus Gate is ours, and with God’s help, total victory is ours.”
This war-mongering declaration soon provoked an answer from Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who said, “Our people will not rest until the occupation is gone and an independent Palestinian state is established, with Jerusalem as its capital,” as reported by the Associated Press.
This exchange comes at a time when both Israel and its chief funder and promoter, Joe Biden, are going through some significant changes. Israel is showing signs of weakness and even failure in its military actions, even as its aggressions are increasing. It has been going back to areas in the North, such as Gaza City, where Hamas was allegedly defeated, asserting that Hamas was now concentrated in Rafah, which, as of this writing (early June) it is still grinding through.
Israel bombs and attacks refugee camp…twice
A major target in the north has been the Jabaliya refugee camp, the largest of such camps in Gaza. Jabaliya is decades old, having existed since after the Nakba of 1948. The residents, their children and grandchildren, were prisoners—never allowed to leave—for fear that they might try to exercise their right of return to their former homes.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in December it had “secured” control of Jabaliya in an action that killed “many terrorists.” Israel then scaled down operations in the North, claiming that “Hamas’s battalions had been dismantled.” But on May 12th, Israel attacked Jabaliya for a second time, saying its “intelligence information” showed “attempts by Hamas to reassemble its terrorist infrastructure and operatives in the area.” Over the next three weeks, “battles raged as tanks and troops advanced into the refugee camp under the cover of intense air and artillery strikes.” When the Israelis finally left, rubble was everywhere, and bodies were left lying in the streets.1
Israel will kill and destroy, but never win
The brutal Israeli attack on Jabaliya shows Israel’s increased murderous intensity, but also its weakness. No matter what it does, it will never be able to defeat Hamas. Hamas will always be able to recruit enough volunteers to keep fighting. Palestinians have been on these lands for centuries and they will not abandon their home. This “war” is very like the U.S. war against Vietnam in that respect. Despite the military superiority of the American army, the National Liberation Front won through their determination, their tunnels, and mainly through their massive support from the people of Vietnam, just like the Palestinians.
Besides the ineffectiveness of their “war,” Israel seems to be facing a stronger Hamas than Hamas before. This is hard to judge from afar, but Israel took serious casualties in the action in Jabaliya, and Hamas was pretty effective, judging from some short videos of their fighters in action and published short videos showing their operatives taking out fighters and tanks effectively from positions in heavy foliage, and one gruesome scene showing a dead Israeli soldier’s body being dragged through a tunnel.2
Cracks in Israeli military
In early June, it seemed that Israel was pumping up its aggression in Rafah, in defiance of Biden’s demand that Israel not escalate there. But it turns out that Israel is also starting to break up internally. It has admitted to disciplinary problems and difficulty in controlling the rank and file of its army. Apparently, soldiers in the field have been trashing houses and blowing up universities at will, without orders; and would-be settlers both in and out of the military are actively planning to move in after the war, as they have in the West Bank.
There is a growing rift between the ultra-rightists in the war cabinet who want Israel to rule Gaza directly, and promote Israeli settlement after the war, and those in government, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in particular, favoring some control by non-Hamas Palestinians in an independent state, albeit under overall Israeli domination. A video surfaced on Israeli social networks on May 25th, showing an armed man in uniform threatening mutiny. In a message directed to defense officials and Netanyahu, he demanded that Gallant “should resign,” and said that 100,000 reservists serving in Gaza “are not willing to ‘hand over the keys of Gaza to any Palestinian Authority’ or other ‘Arab entity.’”
Biden admits: Israel’s “war”
can’t be won
The U.S. President’s surprising announcement on the last day of May that “Israel has now offered, has offered, a comprehensive new proposal,” was a fabrication from the start. First of all, there was no such Israeli proposal; what Biden proposed was the outline of a peace plan that Hamas agreed to and that Israel walked away from, back in early May. Also, Biden claimed that after “several months” of his administration working “relentlessly,” the first thing they have come up was a cease fire, all be it an “enduring” one. But a ceasefire, “enduring” or not, is what the U.S. has invariably vetoed at the UN Security Council, as Israel dismissed it out of hand. It had to “fully defeat”—read “annihilate”—Hamas, you see.
Biden has no doubt been pressuring Netanyahu with this message in private for more than a month now and receiving the wave-off. He even stopped one shipment of weapons, including the 2,000 pound “bunker bombs” at one point. But only this measure has had any effect on Israel’s genocide, and that amounted to a slight easing of the intensity of its attack on the southern city of Rafah. In the first week of June, Israel’s short-lived taming of itself was clearly over.
Biden’s proposal is a lost cause. His through-the-looking-glass proposal even states that “Hamas has been ‘devastated,’” and is “no longer capable of carrying out another October 7.” So, why is the IDF going back over targets in the north that it said were already cleared of Hamas? And how did Hamas put up the effective fight that it did in Jabaliya?
“Terrorist:” the word that
lost its place
The word “terrorist” is the most mis-placed designation in the world. It is always used to describe the small gang of murderers or even individuals acting out of questionable sanity. Usually “the terrorists” are a group striking out against powerful entities, like cities or nations, with no hope whatsoever of achieving anything more than notoriety.
Israel slapped the terrorist label on Hamas way before the October 7th attack; it actually funded Hamas from the beginning in the 1980s precisely so it would have more than one “terrorist” group that would presumably fight amongst themselves, thus weakening Israel’s enemies.
This designation must be turned around. The world is more “terrorized” by what Israel has been doing in the last eight-going-on-nine months than it has been by anything else, and that is saying a lot. Everyone remembers the Nazi Holocaust, but very few are alive now who actually lived through it. Yet it is happening again, with the Jewish state leading the way, and Palestinians the victims.
What comprises a genocidal war?
As is widely reported and well known now throughout the world, Israel’s “war” on Palestine is more of a genocide than a war. Israel is making its “war” by:
- Killing not just another army, but a specific ethnicity, or “group” of people. It starts with de-humanizing the target not as people, but as “human animals,” as Defense Secretary Yoav Gallant declared just a day or two after the October 7th attack. Israel is mass murdering them in “extermination zones” similar to “kill-anything-that-moves” areas designated by the U.S. in its war on Vietnam, except that Israel puts out notices saying an area is safe and then bombs them days or hours later.
- War by confinement, which is one of the most astonishing things about this “war” in Gaza—it is literally an open-air prison. Israel’s “war” is like jailing masses of people, and then machine-gunning them through the bars. This makes it unlike almost all other wars, and very much like the Holocaust, in which its victims were put in concentration camps before being killed in the ovens.
- War by mass starvation. The confinement makes this easy, by turning away trucks full of aid on the excuse that it has the smallest thing—such as scissors used in medical operations—that they say Hamas might use as a weapon. Famine has raised its ugly head in Gaza and is getting worse rapidly now that the Israeli military has captured the Rafah border crossing. This crossing is critical, since most of the essential aid comes through it from Egypt. Starvation threatens both the current generation and the future, as babies are dying for lack of mothers’ milk along with children dying of malnutrition.
- War by spreading disease; Israel is blocking medications and anesthetics as well as food from entering the Gazan concentration camp. Doctors in what is left of hospitals must operate on the wounded without these essentials.
- War by destroying both homes and infrastructure: schools, hospitals, shops, etc. All 12 of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed; and schools that are still standing are used as shelters for people whose homes are now rubble. Israel has even destroyed water purification stations and some water pipes, which is responsible for a huge number of deaths: thirst can’t be quenched, wounds can’t be cleaned, disease is spread from person to person, through contaminated drinking water, sewer water, and so on.
In addition to all these genocidal crimes, Israel is trying to hide what it is doing by erasing the evidence before it comes back to haunt them in the future.3 Note also that this “cultural erasure” and the bombing of areas that it said were safe only hours or day’s previously may be cynically seen by some as Israel’s “improvements” over Hitler’s Holocaust, but the real test of a genocide comes at ground level.
The genocide convention of 1948
Both Israel and its chief backer and funder, the U.S., are signatories to the Genocide Convention of 1948. Israel signed on in 1949, just a few months after committing its first major act of this crime, which was to forcibly expel some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages— “mandate territory”—killing many who resisted, demolishing their homes, imprisoning them in refugee camps, and refusing to let them or their offspring back into their homes (or what was left of them.)
Genocide does not mean killing the entirety of a population. Article II of the Convention makes clear what it does mean: “…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”4
This is the Holocaust—again
As of 2022, 152 states have signed on to this Convention. I do not think that Israel gives a hoot about where the children go, it just wants them dead or gone; so, it may not be guilty of the fifth crime in the Convention. But Israel is guilty of all the other specifics in the Convention beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that the president and most of the Congress of the U.S. denies that this is a genocide and continues to fund and provide weapons to Israel makes it equally guilty for this complicity. (“Complicity” is a crime mentioned in part three of the Convention.) The fact that students in the U.S. are taking the lead to protest, and that the majority agrees with them, is a breath of fresh air.
It is common knowledge that the Genocide Convention was drafted after World War II in reaction to the Nazi Holocaust, but many today seem to have trouble equating what Israel is doing today with the Nazi Holocaust. I disagree, and I think the Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe Nazi policies in occupied Europe, would agree.5
What it is like at ground level
It takes an up-close observation to see what this terrorist regime in Tel Aviv is doing to people—and that, of course is hard to do. But damning reports are there. An exceptional medical doctor from the U.S. was in the first medical aid group to get into Gaza in December as Israel’s bombing war was raging. Professor David Hasan at Duke University was in a medical team of physicians from the U.S., Canada, and England working through an aid organization linked to the UN and the World Health Organization.
The mission of Hasan’s group was to get to the European Hospital, near Khan Yunis in the south of the Gaza Strip. His visit—the first one—was around two months into the war, and already “The hospital itself looked like a refugee camp,” he said in an interview for Haaretz, the left leaning Israeli newspaper.6 “I had never seen so many people living inside a hospital.” It was necessary to constantly look down so as not to step on someone who might be a patient or person seeking some sort of shelter.
Doctors there faced limb amputations without anesthetics and C-sections without sedatives, and many painful choices. Israel’s murderous bombings largely came at night, and “During the night, it was not possible to rescue anyone because there was no electricity,” and “…just being outside was dangerous.” “Every morning around 8:00, a wave of wounded people arrived.…Many of them died from loss of blood or reached us in worse condition because they did not receive immediate treatment. At that point, around nine-out-of-ten of them could not be saved.”
The story of “Jacob”
At one point in Hasan’s stay in the hospital a wounded child about two-years-old arrived. The minute he arrived Hasan knew that he could not be saved, so he turned to help others who had a better chance. But he did not forget about this two-year-old. He went out to see if the child had family. He was told that “his whole family was buried under the ruins, and he was the only one who had been pulled out.” Right then Hasan decided that this child would not die without someone noticing and crying over him, and that he would have to be that person. “I held him to me. I cried over him, and I named him ‘Jacob.’ I vowed that if I have a son, I will name him ‘Jacob’ in his memory.”
On the last day of his first trip, Hasan found that he was infected with COVID-19. Of course he had been fully vaccinated, but “The situation in Gaza is the perfect storm for viruses, a combination of wounds that become infected because they cannot be cleaned properly,” he said. “Almost every person we operated on died a few days later, due to infection.”
“Things were getting worse”
Hasan went back in March and found that conditions were much worse. He encountered more hunger and a higher density of displaced people. “I saw people who had clearly lost a great deal of weight and many more cases of infectious diseases. Mothers arrived with no milk to feed their babies; they were so weak.” The hospital staff was clearly burned out, still working, but fewer of them. They don’t earn any money, and they were constantly in fear of what might be going on at home, he said. “Two doctors who worked alongside me returned home after a 24-hour shift and found that their families were buried under the ruins.”
Another report describes another doctor who had a terrible choice. He was faced with two mothers who between them had three babies who each needed an incubator. He was lucky that there was a working incubator at all; but it only had room for two babies. What a choice! This doctor decided that each mother come away with at least one baby, and thus the remaining baby would have to die.
Palestinians are survivors
Palestinians are going to bed hungry, and in fear of the next bombing of whatever shelter they have managed to acquire, or where they can go when the next attack comes. For a people who have been forced to live like this, year in and year out at least since 1948 and before, they are the most humane and welcoming of anyone in our world. They are terrorized by Israel’s barbarity. To call them or their voted-for leadership “terrorist” for fighting back is criminal.
But what is Hamas? Certainly, this needs more study. We have a great rising of students and their many supporters all over the U.S. demanding a permanent ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, but who have a complete lack of knowledge about Hamas. And as I plan on learning more myself, I leave the reader with two things. One is Hamas’ very rational and unprejudiced programmatic explanation of their October 7th attack called, “Our Narrative…Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” available in the March/April 2024 issue of Socialist Viewpoint, available online.7 This narrative from the Hamas Media Office demolishes the lies about October 7th, and details what Hamas wants for Palestine.
An eyewitness report
I will conclude with a report from Helena Cobban, a non-resident Senior Fellow at Center for International Policy, and journalist at justworldnews.org. Cobban’s report in a recent interview on Flashpoints, KPFA radio, was not something you expect to hear from a Washington, D.C. think tank. Cobban has visited Palestine and Gaza several times, and she said that Biden’s May 31st plan will go nowhere. She agrees that it is Israel who blocks such plans, not Hamas. Cobban testified that Gaza had a thriving civilization, with good schools, good universities, good professionals etc., and she condemned Israel for its dehumanization of Palestinians. Hamas “has been coded as the Mau Mau were by imperialist Britain. They were feared and condemned as savages, but when the British gave up, they became a quite human government.”
In Gaza, Hamas has broad support, Cobban said. She has met with many members of Hamas on her trips, the majority of whom were women. Women have always been respected and promoted into skills by Hamas. Four Hamas women were elected to government positions in the last election. “Too many on the left in the U.S. drank the Cool Aid on Hamas,” she said.
A Hamas woman once sat on the roof of a mosque during the war so that Israel wouldn’t bomb it. She was assassinated at some point later, Cobban said. In the interview, flashpoint’s Dennis Bernstein asked Cobban if it was true that Israel was intentionally killing all the family members of targeted journalists, and she said yes.
There is a lot more to learn about Hamas, but one thing is crystal clear: The only solution to this war is the total defeat of Israel, the imprisonment of Israel’s top civilian and military leaders, the abolition of Israel as a state, and the creation of a free Palestine with equal rights for all.
1 “Gazans returning to Jabalia describe ‘horrifying’ destruction,” BBC News, June 3, 2024.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cl44v6e8461o#
2 “Most Significant Operations”—Quds Brigades Reveal Israeli Losses in Jabaliya, Palestine Chronicle, June 2, 2024.
3 This “cultural erasure” was reported by Vijay Prashad, a historian and journalist heard on KPFA’s Flashpoints program, June 3, 2024.
4 Find the complete text at this UN citation:
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Convention
6 Netta Ahituv, “The Chilling Testimony of a U.S. Neurosurgeon Who Went to Gaza to Save Lives,” Haaretz, May 9, 2024, haaretz.com/Israel-news.
7 http://socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_24/marapr_24_06.html
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/PDF.pdf