The clumsy call for using nuclear weapons on Gaza by a fanatical Israeli politician was only problematic because it articulated what the U.S.-Israeli state policy is. Genocide.
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The only mistake Israeli minister Amichai Eliyahu made was to voice out loud the genocidal policy of his government.
Following his comments that the Israeli military should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, the politician was publicly reprimanded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other members of the cabinet for making statements “not based on reality”.
“Israel and the [Israel Defense Forces] are operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents. We will continue to do so until our victory,” Netanyahu said.
The suggestion of using nuclear weapons was also seemingly rebuked by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who previously referred to Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip as “human animals”.
The apparent attempt to make a distinction within Israel’s fanatical regime is absurd. Netanyahu’s “war cabinet” is carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. The intensity of the killing is accelerating.
A population of 2.3 million people has been cut off from vital human supplies for four weeks. The last remaining hospitals are shutting down from lack of fuel while the densely crowded Gaza City is bombarded non-stop from the air.
Human rights groups have explicitly declared that what the Israeli regime is doing is genocide as defined under international law. There is no equivocation. There is no dispute among rational, independent observers of the daily atrocities inflicted on the people of Gaza. Huge public protests around the world condemning the Israeli war crimes are a testament to the genocide verdict.
The combined load of explosives dropped on the coastal enclave over the past month exceeds 25,000 tonnes. As Euro Med Monitor points out, that lethal force is equivalent to the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima.
This indiscriminate use of lethal weapons on a civilian population – in conjunction with a complete blockade on the territory and the forced internal displacement of over a million people – constitutes multiple war crimes under the overall crime of genocide.
U.S. President Joe Biden refuses to demand that the Netanyahu regime calls a ceasefire. His administration has signed off an order for $320 million of “precision-guided” bombs to Israel. Again, the cynical use of words gives the impression – an absurd impression – that the Israeli regime is exercising some kind of restraint. What is restrained about using “precision-guided” bombs to hit hospitals, schools and refugee camps?
Biden and Washington are guilty of complicity in genocide for supporting this slaughter. So, too, it can be argued, are the Western mass media. They have sought assiduously to sanitize and minimize the horrific crimes being perpetrated.
The U.S. and European media continually report on Israel’s “right to self-defense”. There is no such right under international law for an illegal occupying state whose policy has been systematic violation of international law and aggression against Palestinians since it was established as a state in 1948 with Western colonial connivance.
Western media indulge the U.S. and European governments’ preposterous claims that Israel is trying to limit civilian casualties. They claim, disingenuously, that children and women are regrettable collateral damage because the Hamas Palestinian militants “use civilians as human shields”.
It is disgraceful and criminal the dereliction of duty by Western media in holding to account the Israeli regime and its enablers in the Biden administration.
Even when Israeli officials claim on prime-time TV that there is “no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza and that their military is not targeting civilian centers, Western media outlets like the BBC and CNN allow such vile distortions to be aired without appropriate challenge. An appropriate challenge would entail the media interlocutor eviscerating the Israeli official for insulting common intelligence and basic moral decency based on known facts, such as the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians by the Israeli military.
The propaganda trope about Hamas using human shields is something that Western governments and media should slate with contempt. But they don’t. They peddle it as if it is plausible and thereby lend the indefensible a veneer of credibility. That is media complicity in war crimes.
As Jordan’s Queen Rania eloquently pointed out to CNN, under international law there is an obligation on attacking forces to avoid civilian casualties at all costs, even in circumstances where another group is allegedly holding people as human shields. The Israeli forces have shown no such compunction, as even their military officials brazenly admit and without fear of being subjected to the slightest criticism from the media interviewer. They know they can spout such lies because the Western media like BBC and CNN, and so on, are willing tools of propaganda.
Jordan’s monarch also made the obvious point – obvious to any rational, moral person, but not to Western media – that bombing a densely habited urban zone such as Gaza is to knowingly be prepared to exterminate civilians.
The Hamas militant group is estimated to have under 25,000 members, according to U.S. state intelligence. That represents about 1 per cent of the entire population in Gaza.
Washington and the Israeli regime claim the right to destroy Hamas in retribution for the group’s killing of hundreds of Israelis on October 7.
Evidently, this extrajudicial right is presumed to also permit the destruction of the wider civilian population of “human animals”. The entire Palestinian people are deemed to be acceptable collateral damage.
The Biden administration is amenable to that genocide and indeed is facilitating it with unchecked weapons supply. One phone call from Biden to Netanyahu with a warning to cut off all military supply and other financial aid would expedite an end to the slaughter.
But neither Washington nor Tel Aviv have any fundamental objection to genocide. The clumsy call for using nuclear weapons on Gaza by a fanatical Israeli politician was only problematic because it articulated what the U.S.-Israeli state policy is. Genocide.
