Photo by Naaman Omar, Wafa (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages) – CC BY-SA 3.0
The Question is WHY?
Is the US Establishment Sinfully Aiding and Abetting (Instead of Stopping Cold) Israel’s Genocide of Palestinian Civilians In Order to Warn Rebellion-Minded Red State Republicans (and Others): “THIS is What Happens to Armed Insurrectionists and Their Communities”?
“I worry that no matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”
–Lily Tomlin, acting in Jane Wagner’s 1985 one-woman play titled The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
I have long bought into the wisdom Ms. Wagner imparts in this sage line. Virtually everything of major consequence that happens in our Not-great society and sinfully structured, obscenely stratified world is selfishly dictated by the incumbent wealth and power elites who own and run the commanding heights of the world economy, and implemented by the institutional show-runners who comprise the ruling elites’ good and faithful (very highly paid) servants.
Much of the time our highest level power elites keep the furtive-motivations and covert machinations behind the momentous events they author shrouded in secrecy. As JFK (who learned from his father about the wiles of Joseph P. Kennedy’s fellow business sharks) put it while campaigning for the presidency in 1960: “Things do not just happen, they are made to happen.” Exactly. President Kennedy’s assassination was one of them. And, I assert, the miasmic televised genocide in Gaza is another.
For 12 God-awful weeks now, with “the whole world watching” Israel has been engaged in a devastating and morally abominable genocidal mass murder spree against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the vast majority of whom have no direct affiliation with Hamas.
Media coverage by Aljazeera and increasingly elsewhere is reminiscent of the Vietnam War years with its graphic televised imagery of wholesale destruction of villages, hamlets and contested battleground towns, and “body counts” totaling hundreds per day. The number of Palestinians in Gaza killed now exceeds 21,000 men, women, children and babies and another ~55,000 have been injured, many very seriously. With women and children accounting for most of the casualties. And due to Israel’s savage bombardments and forced shuttering of virtually of all medical facilities in Gaza and the embargo on everything needed to run them, the grievously injured and wounded in Gaza are suffering untreated.
The IDF (Israel Defense Forces), known to the Palestinians as IOF (Israel Occupation Forces), is employing barbaric siege and starvation tactics and committing mass-murders most foul largely indiscriminately (and in some case discriminately) against the civilian population of Gaza, from its everyday people to its most talented non-combatant civil society personnel including journalists, health care providers, scholars, educators, writers and poets. X Twitter This perverse targeted “eliticide” further includes Gaza’s aspiring entrepreneurs. Aljazeera
And the galling rhetoric of Israel and the US to the effect that the former’s military operations in Gaza are directed at “eliminating Hamas” (whatever that means) rather than primarily aimed at “thinning” or “eliminating” (by extermination or exile) the population of Palestinian civilians in Gaza makes the Grand Canyon-sized “credibility gaps” of the Vietnam War era US presidential administrations look minuscule by comparison. In a nightmarish re-run of both America’s criminally insane neo-colonialist war in Vietnam and much longer ago (but pertinent) the razing of Gaza by Napoleon in 1798-99 Times of Israel during the French emperor’s imperialist expedition to Egypt, Israel and the US are saying in sum (while trying to keep a straight-face) that “it’s necessary to destroy Gaza in order to save it.” Ugh!
Americans of conscience and common decency (ie. the real “silent majority”) have been watching Israel’s vengeful sadistic slaughter wrought by its First World military weaponry with mounting fury and disbelief. President Biden’s approval rating is correspondingly and deservedly plummeting along with his (vanishing) re-election prospects. NY Times
I take no pleasure in being able to say to the president: “I told you so sir.” X Twitter
But in a glaring disconnect with public opinion that has long been routine in our prevailing (possibly even pre-revolutionary) scoundrel times, America’s ruling elites are continuing to provide essentially unconditional financial, moral and military and diplomatic support for Israel’s Operation Genocide (my phrase), including vetoes of 2 UN Security Council cease-fire resolutions, while (farcically) feigning rhetorical disapproval for the wholly disproportionate magnitude and sickeningly omnibus nature of Israel’s war aimed at immiserating and eliminating Gaza’s populace.
And lest “genocide” be deemed too dramatic a term: Already >1.8M Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to flee their homes! Only to be slaughtered in the locations they were told to flee to for their safety. Middle East Monitor
“Out of the Mountain of Despair, A Stone of Hope:” South Africa’s Very Well-Wrought Complaint Against Israel for Committing Genocide Lodged with the International Court of Justice (AKA The World Court)
MLK, Jr.’s famous line seems apt. And not a moment too soon. The concept of “paying it forward” (at scale) is being validated: By helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid in the 1980s the world‘s concerned-citizenry positioned the country that produced Nelson Mandela to now perform one of the most noble exigent actions in the annals of international law and diplomacy: Namely to cogently articulate in the requisite detail for international legal purposes what “everybody knows,” in Leonard Cohen‘s famous (possibly actually too-cynical) song of that title, and seek via a complaint to the World Court an immediate cessation of Israel’s diabolical genocide in progress against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
South Africa summarizes its case in a nutshell in the part of its application to the World Court International Court of Justice Filing that asks the presiding judge to issue the equivalent of a preliminary injunction, as follows:
5. South Africa, mindful of the jus cogens character of the prohibition of genocide and the erga omnes and erga omnes partes character of the obligations owed by States under the Genocide Convention, is making the present application to establish Israel’s responsibility for violations of the Genocide Convention; to hold it fully accountable under international law for those violations; and — most immediately — to have recourse to this Court to ensure the urgent and fullest possible protection for Palestinians in Gaza who remain at grave and immediate risk of continuing and further acts of genocide.
6. In light of the extraordinary urgency of the situation, South Africa seeks an expedited hearing for its request for the indication of provisional measures. In addition, pursuant to Article 74(4) of the Rules of Court, South Africa requests the President of the Court to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza by calling upon Israel immediately to halt all military attacks that constitute or give rise to violations of the Genocide Convention pending the holding of such hearing, so as to enable any order the Court may make on the request for the indication of provisional measures to have its appropriate effects. To that end, the Court should order Israel to cease killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinian people in Gaza, to cease the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, and to rescind related policies and practices, including regarding the restriction on aid and the issuing of evacuation directives.
“We’re the United States of America“
President Biden likes to intone this line in a stentorian voice; delivered with gravitas and emphasis it is meant to connote (in sum) our national omnipotence (for better or worse).
As Americans wince in anguish, sorrow and outrage at the scenes of carnage and suffering befalling Palestinians in Gaza that continue to fill their tv and device screens over these decidedly unhappy holidays, the question most of us (with the sole exception of the few Jewish American who are fanatic “Israel-right-or-wrong” Zionists) are asking themselves is: “Why is it that the American leaders we elected are not using the power they clearly have (as the superpower ally Israel would not long survive without) to put an immediate END to this ghastly genocidal crime against Palestinian humanity?!?
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the “Proxmire Act” That Implemented It as US Law
Raphael Lemkin Lemkin Program and William Proxmire C-SPAN are whirling (like tops) in their graves. Each made the cause of hyper-criminalizing in (enforceable) international and US law (in sum) the collective extermination or partial-extermination of one massive set of kindred human beings by aggressors who seek to end the targeted group’s corporeal existence.
Mr. Lemkin gave the world the word “genocide” to denote the kind of unspeakable totalistic madness involved in undertaking such acts of collective extermination and wrote the 1948 UN Convention outlawing it. UN Fact Sheet
And, with tenacity that earned him the nickname “Bulldog,” Mr. Proxmire spoke briefly on the subject on the floor of the US Senate every day it was in session for 19 years until that body ratified the Genocide Convention in 1986 albeit with the reservation that implementing US legislation be passed, giving it the force of US law. That, in turn, required Senator Proxmire to spend two more years negotiating with Republicans traditionally wary of subjecting Americans to the strictures of international law and in this instance one that might oblige the US to prevent genocides abroad. In the end, two compromises were made:
The first compromise restricted the Proxmire Act (AKA Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1987) to genocides or incitements-to-genocide where:
(1) the offense is committed within the United States; or
(2) the alleged offender is a national of the United States (as defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act). (Emphasis on OR added.)
The second category should seemingly give Jewish-American adventurers who serve in the IDF and have been deployed in Gaza since October 7th considerable cause for concern. The same applies to any Israeli officials who have dual US citizenship who have either authored or “merely” incited Israel’s genocide in Gaza. (The statute of limitations on genocide, like that of murder, is presumably indefinite.)
The second compromise involved limiting the maximum punishment for committing genocide to life imprisonment and a fine of $1M whereas the Republicans favored the death penalty.
And on a rainy day in November 1988, at a ceremony held at O’Hare airport in Chicago, President Reagan signed that implementing legislation, paying tribute to Senator Proxmire and others in stilted serviceable bipartisan remarks that make Reagan seem like Cicero in comparison to the top leaders of the US and Israel today, both of whom resemble Auden’s Ogre from his poem August 1968:
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
Today, the proscriptions enshrined in the UN Genocide Convention and US law implementing it are being openly and notoriously mocked.
In view of both the hyper-criminality and universal ignominy of genocide and President Biden’s unquestioned power to order Israel to stand down (as President Reagan did in a telephone call with Prime Minister Menachem Begin during Israel’s sociopathic Lebanon invasion in 1982): On the surface there is no rational explanation for America’s tortuously prolonged acquiescence to Israel’s methodical annihilation of Gaza civilians en masse in lieu of primarily engaging with the Palestinian armed militants there. This form of scorched earth war criminality is referred to in IDF military parlance as “the Dahiya doctrine” (which is simply mass murder by another name).
On the contrary, as President Reagan’s remarks at the Proxmire Act signing ceremony attest, our country’s current (unfathomable) condonation of open and notorious genocide belies everything America has said it stands for since we helped midwife the United Nations into being following WW2. And it didn’t just happen. It was made to happen. The question, again, is Why?
President Truman Recognized the Potential for Genocidal Communal Violence Posed by Zionism’s Aberrant Form of Settler-Colonialism Which Aimed to Displace the Palestinian Populace in 1947 Palestine With European Jews, and Tried to Mitigate It.
Zionism was the last and arguably the worst form of settler-colonialism because it illegally dispossessed through military force (AKA stole) most of the land, natural resources, infrastructure and human capital of an entire country, British Mandate Palestine (hereinafter “1947 Palestine”); and did so based on an utterly fabulistic (self-invented self-proclaimed) claim that Jews had/have an alleged “right” to entirely displace the Palestinian population not “just” subjugate, dominate and exploit the locals. See generally Ilan Pappe’s important 2017 book titled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
This was a dangerous whopper claim no other European settler-colonialists had EVER made. Simply because the whole purpose of English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and other European colonization was “merely” ill-gotten financial gains.
In his classic 1957 book titled The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi, the gifted (but eternally conflicted) Tunisian Jewish writer describes with lacerating insight the aberrant vanities of privileged French colonialists, the white-skinned privileged Frenchmen, mostly Babbitt-like businessmen and civil servants, who were (in sum) “in Tunisia (the real Tunisia) but not of it.” His portrait of his fellow colonizers’ assorted complexes and insecurities vis-a-vis their mainland France compatriots is wickedly discerning as is his depiction of the French interlopers’ deep-seated racist, condescending and dehumanizing attitudes towards the Tunisian multitudes, with whom the colonizers were co-dependent.
In a telling passage in Part Three of his book (titled Conclusion) that is suddenly disturbingly relevant, Memmi explains why European colonialists never seriously considered “final solutions” such as that which psychopathic-sociopathic Israelis are acting-out now in Gaza:
It has not been so long since Europe abandoned the idea of a possible total extermination of a colonized group. It has been said, half-seriously, with respect to Algeria: “There are only nine Algerians for each Frenchman. All that would be necessary would be to give each Frenchman a gun and nine bullets.” The American example is also evoked: and it is undeniable that the famous national epic of the Far West greatly resembles systematic massacre. In any case, there is no longer much of an Indian problem in the United States.
As Memmi further explains though:
Extermination…actually contradicts the colonial process. Colonization is above all economic and political exploitation. If the colonized is eliminated, the colony becomes a country, like any other, and who then will be exploited? Along with the colonized, colonization would disappear, and so would the colonizer.
Evaluating all the complex sociological co-dependencies between colonialist Israelis and colonized Palestinians is beyond the scope of this writing. But briefly applying Memmi’s insight to the present crisis is not reassuring. On the one hand, Israel profits immensely from its associations with colonized Palestinians. For example:
* Jewish owned- and operated businesses in Israel and the West Bank employ Palestinians in large numbers as an exploited proletariat;
* Israel exports the Panopticon-type surveillance technology it develops and deploys during its draconian military policing operations in the West Bank;
* It markets arms that it tests during its regular military bombardments and re-invasions of Gaza, a (25 miles long and 4-5 miles wide) area bordered by Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea that Israel has essentially converted into a land-mass-wide imprisoned society of >2M Palestinian people (mostly refugees from 1947 Palestine and their multi-generational progeny); and
* Israel duns hundreds of billions of dollars from US taxpayers ostensibly based on its utility to America as a Western colonial military outpost in the oil-rich Arab world and on the alleged existential threats the Jewish colonists there face from the Palestinians they ejected en masse from their land and communities during the 1948 Nakba and again after the 1967 6-day war and incrementally ever since in the West Bank and East Jerusalem through “salami tactics” that have highly-complicated if not foreclosed a 2-state solution.
And all of these revenue streams would lessen if not disappear if Israel ever, God forbid, completed a “final solution” comparable in size to the Holocaust the Nazis perpetrated against European Jewry during WW2.
On the other hand, Memmi’s reference to a post-genocide colony becoming a “nation like any other” (eerily) dovetails with Zionism’s crackpot founding creed, and it cannot be safely presumed that the economic utility of Palestinians to local Jews will ultimately stay Israel’s hand from doing its worst.
And, since Israel’s unilateral partial “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 leaves it with no commercial ties to speak of with Gazans other than those associated with being an open-air prison warden, in the grim calculous of which Palestinians are most vulnerable to Israeli genocidal aggression Gazans clearly are in the most peril, followed by Palestinians in the West Bank, followed by Palestinian citizens in Israel.
Knowing There Was a Distinct Possibility It Would Someday Result in Genocidal Violence, at the Behest of His “First Friend” Edward “Eddie” Jacobson, President Truman Recognized Israel Against US Secretary of State George Marshall’s Sound Advice; That Day of Reckoning Has Now Come
Prior to Israel’s self-declaration of statehood in 1948 President Truman had become exasperated with the insistence by Zionist lobbyists that Israelis’ genocide-minded fever dreams to displace all Palestinians with Jewish immigrants be indulged by the US. Gary Ginsburg, an author of a book on presidential “first friendships” (and an ardent Zionist) wrote:
Truman’s own State Department, led by General George Marshall, a World War II hero and a man almost universally revered, adamantly opposed the idea of partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, believing it would push the Arab world into the Soviet sphere. Marshall also argued that such a move would imperil American access to Arab oil, and almost certainly require the presence of US troops to contain the violence. (Emphasis added this writer, not Mr. Ginsburg.)
Truman felt so put-upon that he told his aides not to schedule any more meetings with bumptious Zionist representatives. Zionist lobbyists then enlisted Edward “Eddie” Jacobson(no relation to myself), Truman’s Jewish WW1 Army buddy and later Truman’s partner in a haberdashery business in Missouri. Jacobson persuaded the president to relent and Truman ultimately granted US recognition to Israel’s self-declaration of statehood shortly after they had done so in May 1948.
In two videos found in his presidential library President Truman discusses for posterity his thinking behind that fateful diplomatic recognition. In one he discloses that he was attempting to navigate equitably between Palestinian Arabs and European Jews who both sought exclusive sovereignty over- and residency in 1947 Palestine. Each group, he said in his “plain speaking” Missouri drawl, wanted to exterminate the other: “The Jews wanted to chase all the Arabs into the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the Arabs wanted to chase all the Jews into the Red Sea.”
In the other video Truman evinces exasperation (by name) with the Zionists who, he said, had what we would today call an “entitlement syndrome” and wanted the US to (in sum) approve their ethnic cleansing of “5-6 million” Palestinians to make room for “5-6 million” Europeans Jewish immigrants. So much for the fatuous Zionist propagated myth that 1947 Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land.”
The net impression one gets from the videos (especially in conjunction) is of a US President straining to elide the potentially genocidal implications of what he has done and asserting (without much conviction) that ultimately Palestine can equitably be shared: “We had all sorts of objections to everything that was done…now it’s working out. Eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied. But it’s going to take a great deal of time yet to get the job done.” (Emphasis added.)
The president’s support tor the 1948 UN Genocide Convention may not have been coincidental. And, as we now know, these optimistic words from Truman’s lips about having “them all satisfied” (Palestinians and Jewish immigrants) never made it to God’s ears. And as a president who coined the phrase for the Oval Office desk: “The buck stops here” and further in light of his personal responsibility for conferring legitimacy on Israel, it’s likely that President Truman too has been spinning in his grave at the damnable genocidal world-historical civilizational debacle that has unfolded since October 7th.
As a Matter of Natural Law, Zionism’s Aberrant Settler-Colonial Core Tenets Were- and Are Unsound, Unjust and Indefensible and As a Matter of Equity Had No Practical Utility Following the Allied Victory Over the Axis Powers in WW2
Now that the “s–– has hit the fan” (ie. Israel has “jumped the shark” and the genocide President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall (and some of their successors) sought to avoid is in deadly progress), this is another subject that is too pertinent not to mention but is space-prohibitive to fully discuss in this writing.
Briefly put:
Virtually all diaspora Jews rejected Zionism (AKA Jewish statehood) when it was first formally proposed in 1897. Jewish communities throughout the diaspora recognized Zionism was a tacit endorsement of the extant premise of antisemites that Jews “didn’t belong” in the European countries many Jews (including my own paternal German-Jewish grandparents and their parents) had successfully assimilated into following the admission of Jews into civil society in Europe as a consequence of the post-French revolution Napoleonic wars. See the ingenious emancipatory blueprint Napoleon employed in France first here: Wikipedia
And the vast majority of theistic European Jews also saw Zionism as a religious heresy in that Judaism had irreversibly morphed over ~2,000 years into a diaspora religion. In sum, notwithstanding (or more accurately because of) the Passover Seder recital “Next year in Jerusalem,” observant Jews everywhere in the diaspora viewed Jews returning to Palestine en masse by human agency as opposed to divine providence as a violation of Jewish messianic religious precepts.
Their religious teaching told them Zionism constituted what Erich Fromm called “forcing the Messiah” and their common sense told them Zionism had all the makings of a European colonialist prescription for disaster for all concerned in essentially every respect. Only the Holocaust and the US refusal to admit ships carrying Jews fleeing Nazi persecution caused any sizeable fraction of European and North American Jews to reluctantly support Zionism.
And this is not to speak of the schisms within Zionism of the sort a group of 30 distinguished Jewish notables including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein adverted-to in their famous December 2, 1948 letter to the editor of the NY Times.
This intense well-wrought letter warned the American Jewish community and the Truman administration about the maniacally fascistic nature of Menachem Begin and his ultra-extremist Irgun wing of the broader Zionist terrorist network which was attempting to re-brand itself as a conventional conservative political party. The letter’s chilling account of the Irgun Zionists’ genocidal massacre of 240 Palestinian “men, women and children” at the peaceable Palestinian village of Deir Yassin is a terrible foreshadowing of the nearly hundred-fold higher wanton slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza Israel’s fascistic government has ordered the IDF to conduct since October 7, 2023.
Nor does Zionism’s central claim to legitimacy as a settler-colonialist project survive any objective logical scrutiny: Namely that Jews’ (broken) generational linkage with ancient Jewish forebears dating back ~2,000 years gives them (and I speak here of my people as my 94-year-old mother is also Jewish as were her parents) a right to re-occupy all or most of the same lands in Palestine where tribes of Jews then lived.
Accordingly, Israel and the US have ludicrously told Palestinians (with a straight face) since 1948: You must agree to be expropriated by and governed by the “returning” modern progeny of ancient Jewish tribes. To put it simply (and kindly), this absurdist generational-time-travel/irredentist claim is foreclosed by the natural laws of civilizational adverse possession, which entirely favors the Palestinians’ claim to sovereignty over all of 1947 Palestine:
At the time the British relinquished sovereignty of 1947 Palestine, Palestinians had been continuously living on their ancestral land for over 100 generations! And in part due to the technological advancements wrought by British colonialism, Palestine was a complex thriving society in 1947. My late father-in-law’s father, for example, who lived with his wife and children in Jabal al-Karmil, a coastal mountain community, worked as a train engineer in nearby Haifa; and launched his brilliant eldest son on an educational and career path that led him to become a high-ranking professional electrical engineer in Canada’s civil service.
As a Jewish-American who married into a Palestinian family I can attest that Palestinians are perhaps the most warm, personable, pious, hospitable, charitable, middle-class family-oriented people on the planet and that what Zionist Israelis have done- and are continuing to do to them via their genocidal-minded military invasion and exceptionally oppressive settler- colonization of 1947 Palestine is a shanda (Yiddish for shameful sin) and moral abomination of the highest order.
At the Time of Israel’s Inception in 1948 Neither European Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust Nor Diaspora Jews Elsewhere Needed a Zionist Garrison-state in Palestine to Serve as a Safe-haven from Potential Genocidal Targeting by Militarily-Empowered Organized Antisemites Anywhere in the World; Because the Latter No Longer Existed
The US and our Allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, had defeated the virulently-antisemitic German Nazis and their allied Italian and Japanese Axis bloc fascist states 3 years prior to Israel’s founding. Germany itself then underwent a thorough de-Nazification program and the unreconstructed Nazis who survived in remnants scattered and settled in the Americas, including in the US, where they were partially but not fully quarantined. See The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau.
And whereas antisemitism persisted at the grassroots level in the USSR, especially in western Ukraine, and in Russia’s Eastern Europe satellite countries following World War 2, the authoritarian Communist governments throughout the USSR all suppressed it (as I briefly discussed in my last CounterPunch essay).
Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991 theistic Jews behind the Iron Curtain lacked religious freedom in common with Orthodox Christians and Muslims throughout the USSR and in Communist-governed Eastern bloc countries where (in keeping with Karl Marx’s most dubious contention) monotheistic religion was regarded as “the opiate of the masses” and atheism was promoted by the state.
(It didn’t occur to Marx that, for example, the Jewish concept of the Sabbath as “a day of rest” from work and for worship—the forerunner of the modern 40 hour work-week and weekend—is what distinguishes free people from slaves who were- and still are in some wretched places today, obliged to work for their masters essentially 24-7-365. One or two days of rest per week is less than the liberation Marx sought from capitalistic exploitation of workers altogether, but clearly represented an advancement for human civilization.)
Following WW2, in America and virtually everywhere in the world where diaspora Jews lived, although not completely free from antisemitic prejudice, diaspora Jews and their communities were as- or more safe, secure, prosperous and socially accepted than Jews had ever been in world history. In the US today, antisemitism, such as it still is, is more than ever the vulgarian “poor man’s socialism” it always predominantly was and less the bigoted opportunity-diminishing bill of attainder based on religious, ethnic or cultural differences it was to varying degrees in pre-WW2 America. (An example of those largely bygone times is that President Truman’s own in-laws in Missouri, in whose house Harry and his wife Bess lived, were confirmed antisemites who wouldn’t allow Truman’s Jewish friend, Army buddy and business partner Eddie Jacobson to even sit on their front porch!)
And I’m confident that most American Jews were off-put if not outright offended (as I was) at President Biden’s parroted Zionist talking point at the December 2023 White House Hanukkah ceremony: “Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe – were there no Israel.” Come again Mr. President?!
This gaffe (or gaffe-adjacent) remark by the president managed to cast doubt on both the safety and patriotism of America’s Jewish citizenry. Because if, God forbid, say, an antisemitic-tinged civil war were to break out in the US American Jews would enlist and fight the Nazis here at home rather than flee to Israel in any appreciable numbers. Jews have fought in every American war and few if any would ever think of fleeing to Israel if, God forbid, a second US civil war came.
American Jews embrace ethnic and religious and racial pluralism and diversity and have no truck with racism much less KKK-type exterminationist violence such as Israel is criminally insanely visiting upon the Palestinians. US Jews remember, admire and appreciate President Washington’s famous letter to the Jews of the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island: “America” Washington said, “gives to bigotry no sanction. To persecution no assistance.” And (again, apart from a few chauvinistic “Israel right or wrong Zionists”) US and all diaspora Jews worldwide abhor, condemn and in no way condone the ethnocentric ultra-bigoted anti-Palestinian true colors fascistic Israelis are now showing and genocidally acting out.
Truman’s Hopes That Palestine Could Be Peaceably Partitioned Almost Immediately Turned to Dross as Did His Lesser Hope That Genocide Could Be Prevented; and “the Rest Became History” Which Has Now Gone Ghoulishly Awry
President Truman stated that he agreed to award ~half of 1947 Palestine to Zionist Jewish settler-colonialists (in sum) to PREVENT a genocidal war between the former (who had formed well-armed militias) and Palestine’s Arab populace of 5M who were not nearly comparably militarily mobilized. But (to understate it considerably) Truman’s earnest hope that “eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied” was dashed.
No sooner had the “ink dried” on America’s recognition of Israel did Zionist militias sociopathically perpetrate the Nakba, the genocidal ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by terror, mass murder and forcible transportation of the local populace from their homes (the keys to which many kept and passed on to their children, always expecting to return) and communities in Palestine to refugee camps in neighboring countries. The exterminationist massacre at Deir Yassin was not an isolated incident; another occurred at Tantura which is the subject of a 2022 documentary featuring confessions by Israeli soldiers to a near My Lai-level massacre and atrocities.
(Radical journalist IF Stone would call the Palestinian refugee camps created by this massive crime against Palestinian humanity “a moral millstone around the neck of the Western world.”)
History will judge (harshly) how and why successor US presidential administrations “blew it” and failed to usher in a peaceable 2-state solution or suitable melding of the 2 “peoples of the book” into a single pluralist, just and secure successor state to British Mandate Palestine. And the manner in which that failure, grounded (in sum) in US appeasement of Israel’s Zionist fascists throughout the ensuing 75 years, positioned Israel to dare commit the current genocide.
This is yet another space-prohibitive topic for another time. Suffice it for me to say (as a possessor of a mere BA degree in history from UC Berkeley with distinction in general scholarship) that historians will focus much of the blame on the misguided but alas entrenched “Progressive except Palestine” outlook of the post-Truman and post-JFK Democratic Party.
JFK “died trying” to deal (quite testily) with Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion regarding 3 major issues: the Palestinian refugees who had been unjustly expelled from their communities and homes during the Nakba and their right to return; Israel’s development of nuclear weapons; and the vast Zionist lobbying operations in the US (of the sort that had exasperated President Truman) which President Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General, decided should require the pro-Israel lobbyists to register as foreign agents. All as recounted in Chapter 14 of a fine monograph published in 2022 by Monica Wiesak titled America’s Last President: What America Lost When It Lost John F. Kennedy.
Fast-forwarding to the past 3 decades, this blinkered US Israel-lobby-induced-and-enforced “progressive except Palestine” politics has eroded sympathy for the Palestinians’ plight amongst Democratic power elites (although America’s grassroots Democrats and more progressive independents have become increasingly pro-Palestinian), derailed the “middle east peace process” into an unproductive cul-de-sac (the Oslo Accords) and then into hibernation altogether when Israel and the US nullified the victory Hamas won in free-and-fair 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections (by prohibiting Hamas from having any role in the governance of the West Bank as opposed to Gaza). All this in turn set-up the Palestinian civilians in Gaza to thereafter endure multiple rounds of sadistic merciless massacres at the hands of Israel’s first-world military, bombings and shellings Israeli fascist officials (psychopathically) dubbed “mowing the lawn” (whatever that means).
The UN Genocide Convention Embodies Fundamental Human Rights America Fought Our Revolution Against Great Britain to Secure for Ourselves, Our Posterity and to the Extent Practicable, for All People in the World; the Palestinians Among Them. It is in America’s Vital Interests to Enforce It By Ending Israel’s Genocide Forthwith
As the whole world now recognizes, genocide is the ultimate desecration of human rights. For it totally negates and blasphemes the distillation of natural law Thomas Jefferson famously outlined in 1776 in our nation’s founding charter, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (First letter capitalization emphasis in original; underscored emphasis added)
President Kennedy restated it as well as anyone in modern times in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “[T]he same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. … [P]roud of our ancient heritage—[we are] unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” (Underscored emphasis added.)
Palestinians were always entitled to take umbrage at the US and even the UN “playing God” and enabling European Jewish immigrants to steal half of their ancestral land. Palestinians were NOT responsible for the Holocaust, the force majeure event that catalyzed Israel into existence.
And the Palestinians were and are NEVER going to go quietly into the good night of historical extinction at the hands of European Zionist usurpers of their land, society and culture that rightfully belongs to them. They had and have the same God-given rights as all men and women to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and the corollary right to resist occupation and tyranny by European colonizers as all other colonized peoples in the global south did in the 20th century.
It is therefore no surprise that the most patriotic Palestinians in Gaza developed a non-negligible but limited capacity to militantly resist what Israelis have never hidden was- and is their ultimate intention to commit genocide against the Palestinians by entirely displacing them from the occupied territories (and eventually from Israel itself) via extermination or forced exile.
But while there has been much talk about the failure of Israel‘s intelligence services in advance of October 7, 2023 there has been no attention whatsoever paid to the failure of US intelligence to properly apprise President Biden and his senior advisors about how quickly and contagiously genocidal dynamics could occur in Gaza given the striking of the right match by Hamas for example.
At least one senior US official was in a position to warn President Biden about the risk at hand and advise him of steps he could have taken to head off Israel’s epochal dastardly genocidal aggression because she had already formulated such a “path not taken” some 2 decades ago. Samantha Power, President Obama’s US Ambassador to the United Nations and current head of USAID, literally “wrote the book” (“A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide) on the subject of the (at least moral) obligation of America to prevent clearly foreseeable genocides (via strenuous diplomacy and if absolutely necessary via Responsibility to Protect Humanitarian Military Interventions).
In an interview with a University of California professor aired on UCTV in the early 2000s Ms. Power explained how America could and should respond if Israelis or Palestinians were “moving toward genocide” as the questioner put it. The interview is still online here: YouTube
What if any private advice Ms. Power has given the president in the current crisis is unknown. But, as Ms. Power candidly (if overly tactfully) alluded to in her (yesteryear) interview response: Squarely at issue before President Biden now is whether the “progressive except Palestine” doctrine that has become embedded amongst Democratic Party power elites will be durably stretched to encompass “anti-genocide, except Palestine” and paralyze America from decisively intervening to end Israel’s hyper-criminal genocidal aggression against the Palestinians.
If it, God-forbid, were to be so enlarged, America will irretrievably forfeit whatever may be left of our reputation for having redeeming features to balance our myriad unattractive ones in the eyes of world public opinion. In sum, our further complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza will FOREVER stain our escutcheon as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in Lincoln’s famous line in the Gettysburg Address hearkening back to the Declaration of Independence. The clock is ticking on that indelible reputational harm.
And in a world that is rapidly evolving from unipolar to multi-polar in nature, how long America can survive such a total depletion of our moral capital, is an open question. By enlisting us as a partner in their daily sociopathic crimes against Palestinian humanity, Israel is impairing our nation’s vital interests. In a worst-case scenario, the accumulating revilement we are generating “on the streets” of virtually all non-Western countries and in the huts and villages of half the world (aka the global South) JFK also referred to in his Inaugural Address, can ultimately put us in a position to lose WW3, and possibly deserve to lose.
So WHY Is the Genocide Being Televised? The Awful Truth Is That the US Establishment Is Sinfully Sacrificing Palestinian Lives and Society Knowing That What Israel Is Doing Is Evil, Because Israel’s Slaughter Is a Useful Means of Intimidating Potential Armed Insurrectionists in America’s Red (and Purple) States (And Their Fellow Travelers Elsewhere in the US and In Other Western Countries)
Of all the post-Truman presidents by far the most opprobrium for the current crisis, in my view, must be heaped on the incumbent, who has yoked his name to the genocidal horror show in Gaza he has inexplicably allowed to play out for over 12 weeks like a depraved Grinch Who Stole Christmas and all other year-end holiday festivities all over the world, including New Year’s Eve on which I am finishing this essay. “Hey ho, Genocide Joe, How many kids have you killed for dough” may not have the ring of “Hey, hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today?” But it properly indelibly associates President Biden’s name with the hyper-criminal mass murder of >21,000 Palestinians (almost entirely civilians) and identifies mercenary motives that are in the background of everything elite politicians do in an era in which virtually every highly advantaged person has “broken bad” to one degree or another.
But the indictment the president will face at the bar of history that should most concern the president is one that relates to what I believe history will judge to have been President Biden’s ulterior motives for “standing there” instead of “doing something” for 12 weeks (and counting) while Palestinian lives were being merciless and needless extinguished by the IDF, when it was in his power to save them.
Having considered and dismissed all the conceivable competing remotely plausible explanations (a laundry list too long and immaterial to spell out) for President Biden to have allowed this I cannot avoid the conclusion that he and his Democratic elite cohorts have an ulterior motive for countenancing Israel’s barbaric genocide that is so baroque, sinister and Machiavellian as to initially defy credulity; but which, on reflection, is the only explanation by which sense can be made of this otherwise irrational, inexplicable and ghoulish world-historical event:
It appears the president has allowed this genocide to go on and on and on in order to send the following message to (primarily but not exclusively) the Democrats’ rebellion-minded red (and purple) state Republican political opponents: “THIS kind of wholesale death, destruction and destitution (or worse) is what can and will happen to YOU and your communities if you dare to attempt an armed revolt following the 2024 presidential election or any future elections!”
Such a serious (highly cynical and somewhat inflammatory) surmise, of course, requires at least some supporting evidence. And (alas) there IS evidence that inflicting genocidal violence against their domestic political opponents has in fact entered the thinking of mainstream elected Democrats:
Eric Swalwell, a prominent Northern California (East Bay) Democratic Congressman and 2020 presidential candidate, said this “quiet part out loud” in a Twitter exchange he had on Nov. 16, 2018 with Joe Biggs, a rightist Trump supporter and conservative social media influencer (who was later convicted of seditious conspiracy and given a 17 year prison sentence for co-leading the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol).
Rep. Swalwell was advocating for a federal gun control law that would mandate the compulsory buy-back of citizens’ assault weapons. Biggs responded (in sum) that if the federal government ever sought to enforce such a gun control law it would start a civil war: “So basically @RepSwalwell wants a war,” Biggs tweeted. “Because that’s what you would get. You’re outta your f—ing mind if you think I’ll give up my rights and give the gov all the power.”
To which Swalwell retorted: “And it would be a short war my friend. The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit. I’m sure if we talked we could find common ground to protect our families and communities.” (Emphasis added.)
Biggs’ account- and hence his part of the exchange has been deleted by X-Twitter; Rep. Swalwell has left his part of the (disturbing) exchange up. See X Twitter. This could only be because Swalwell received no Democratic Party peer pressure (at least none he was willing to heed) to take it down. The least that can be deduced is that Mr. Swalwell’s “brain fart” (so to speak) was not that of an isolated crank within mainstream Democratic Party elite circles.
And if (as Swalwell’s undeleted tweet indicates) mainstream Democratic officials are now comfortable issuing in terrorem (genocidal) threats to resort to nuclear weapons if Republican rightists engage in armed rebellion against the United States, then a fortiori the idea of resorting to conventional warfare against Republican rebels and their communities (ala the razing of Gaza we have all been witnessing) in the event say, of an armed uprising in response to the GOP’s loss of the 2024 presidential election, is something that Democratic Establishment elites and their deep state allies would have even less compunction about doing.
And (unfortunately) there is another data point that fortifies my thesis: One that is far too incendiary to have “just happened” but had to have been “made to happen.” Rep. Swalwell’s unhinged nuclear threat was recently echoed by Israel’s Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu who said in a radio interview on Sunday Nov. 12, 2023 that Israel dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “an option.” See AP News.
Given the official Israel policy of (in sum) “strategic ambiguity” about whether it even possesses nuclear weapons, it is virtually inconceivable that a government minister would “accidentally” mention the possibility of Israel using nuclear weapons in their genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. And further, in view of the close coordination between the Biden administration and the Israeli government, it is highly likely that an Israeli minister’s reference to the use of nuclear weapons in Gaza—a “brain fart” identical to Mr. Swalwell’s which was sure to garner international news coverage—was choreographed in or near Washington DC, likely in Langley Virginia. And meant to strengthen the “demonstration effect” the ghastly televised Gaza genocide is intended to have on potential-American-rebel audiences.
Adding a nuclear strike threat to the genocidal aggression Israelis are wretchedly visiting upon Gazans with bunker-buster bombs and other conventional weapons to such lethal effect, was almost certainly “made to happen” by US officials who were aiming to get the attention of say, Trump supporters who might otherwise be likely to resort to armed insurrection in late 2024 in the event that say, (unlike in 2020) they really are cheated out of a Trump second term.
And therein, I submit, lies the real (indeed surreal and despicably tawdry) reason President Biden is permitting Israel to conduct this televised genocide and for the mainstream Democrats’ deafening silence in the face of all the sadistically-inflicted atrocities against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. It has essentially nothing to do with the merits of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is simply the Democrats’ perverse way of demonstrating to Trump’s rightist base what can and will happen to THEM if they ever dare to take up arms in the event President Biden defeats the 2024 Republican nominee. It also explains why the actions and explanations of Biden and his senior officials for what they are doing make absolutely NO rational sense. They are deflections from the real reason, which is too transgressive to be publically admitted.
In reprehensibly so approving Israel’s mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians—men, women, children and babies—each and every one of whom possessed the God-given right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” President Biden and mainstream Democratic power elites are deplorably betraying America’s founding values and collapsing our nation’s “soft power” by forfeiting and forsaking one of THE most important achievements in the entire post-World War II era civilization canon, the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1988 US implementing law (the Proxmire Act).
Instead of invoking the Genocide Convention and demanding that Israel to stand down, Democrats are using Israel’s genocide to frighten and intimidate their conservative-and-farther-right political rivals. To call that unconscionable and Un-American is a vast understatement. It is diabolically evil.
President Biden must order Israel to end this genocidal madness AT ONCE! CEASEFIRE NOW!
My Further Advice to the President Biden
In closing, I acknowledge having light credentials to issue the further policy advice I am about to give President Biden and his team. I am a former Naval Reserves petty officer and a recovering political consultant who advised Colorado Senator Gary Hart during his 1980s Democratic presidential primary campaigns.
Sen. Hart, a serious JFK acolyte, taught that the highest office in the country is that of “citizen.”
And it is in that capacity that I wish to channel the advice I believe the late great George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman during World War 2 and Secretary of State and later Secretary of Defense under President Truman, would give the incumbent president were he to beam in from heaven regarding the disaster Marshall knew would someday happen if President Truman recognized Israel (without more), and implored Truman to avoid.
President Biden ought to further inform Mr. Netanyahu and his fascist cohorts that by perpetrating this nightmarish vengeful aggression that President Truman and Secretary of State Marshall most feared, a televised genocide, Israel has effectively forfeited its entitlement to separate Jewish statehood. President Biden should rescind the US diplomatic recognition of Israel President Truman (reluctantly) conferred. And further inform Israel’s leaders and civil society as follows:
In America, (since 1865) we’ve resolved political differences by the ballot box, not by civil warfare. What’s needed now in 1947 Palestine is a medium-to-long-term transitional peace and reconciliation process whereby sovereignty in all of Israel and the occupied territories is re-established as a byproduct of a plebiscite among ALL the inhabitants of 1947 Palestine and their progeny. In this way, President Truman’s fond hope—“eventually I think we’ll have them all satisfied”—may come to pass at long last.
And while the good statesman-like, decent, thinking, kinder and gentler people in Israel and Palestine work earnestly together to found a liberated, new, just, democratic and peaceable Palestine, in my personal best-case scenario the senior leaders of Israel who authored this psychopathic-sociopathic hyper-criminal bloodletting against Palestinian civilians will be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court for genocide, be convicted and life-imprisoned: Preferably on the flyspeck island of Saint Helena, where Napoleon, who also scourged Gaza, took his last breath.
Let Mr. Netanyahu and his partners in war crime and genocide ruminate there for the rest of their days on their mass murders most foul of Palestinian civilians and on the hash they and all their fellow Zionists have made of Napoleon’s good deed in liberating Europe’s Jews from their ghetto and shtetl lives.
The post The Genocide Will be Televised appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eric C. Jacobson.
Eric C. Jacobson | Radio Free (2024-01-03T06:59:34+00:00) The Genocide Will be Televised. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/01/03/the-genocide-will-be-televised/
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