Comments
ACCORDING TO LIZ - Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed it his "holy mission" to invade Gaza after the Israeli military had already murdered over 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them over 3,000 children, almost all at a safe distance from their adversaries.
Galit Distal Atbaryan, a Knesset member and Israel’s former Public Diplomacy Minister called for Israeli officials to focus on one goal in a Facebook post: “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth."
She went on, calling for vengeance and viciousness, a "second Nakba" – a second expulsion of the Palestinian people from their own land – and concluded: "Or let them die... Gaza needs to be wiped out."
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has demonized residents of Gaza, half of them children, as "human animals" ordering absolute lockdowns of the territory cutting off food, fuel, and electricity as well as communications and medical assistance.
On a national news channel, prominent political commentator Eliyahu Yossian called for the Israeli Defense Forces to invade Gaza “with the aim of revenge, zero morality, maximum corpses” and “there is no population in Gaza, there are 2.5 million terrorists.”
Before the current conflict erupted, the Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich claimed in Paris that “There's no such thing as Palestinians because there's no such thing as a Palestinian people” and that the West Bank town of Huwara should be "wiped out" by "the state of Israel."
When the United Nations Security Council deadlocks on issues of international peace due to one or more of the permanent members exercising their veto power, it can call an Emergency Session of the full body so the Security Council can take the temperature on where every country stands.
This they did. On October 27, the UN General Assembly called for an “immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities” in Gaza by a vote of 120 to 14, to which the Israeli ambassador accused those who voted in favor of this “ridiculous resolution” of supporting "the defense of Nazi terrorists" over Israel.
Back home, his country responded to the global call for a truce by escalating its murderous bombing raids and pushing forward on its ground invasion.
But even in Israel, Netanyahu’s cabal now has little support. Public backing for a large-scale ground offensive by the military fell from 65% on October 19th to 29% eight days later. Now, with international anger against the Israeli bellicosity rising and hopes for the return of the hostages falling, there is little cause for confidence.
Fully one-third of the victims of the October 7th Hamas attack have been revealed as soldiers, police and other security personnel, nowhere near the 100% murder of innocents as claimed by Israel to inflame world opinion. Unnecessarily so, since no killing by Hamas is acceptable.
The 40 decapitated babies story, a social media sensation spread by sources as disparate as Biden and Fox News in an inverse of previous centuries’ propaganda that Jews ate Christian children, is another unnecessary perversion since only seven children ranging in age from 4 to 10 are listed among the dead. Still horrific but… how can the world trust a government skilled in psy-ops when they cook up such blatantly false claims.
Israel’s actions, including its indiscriminate slaughter of journalists and humanitarian aid workers, are endangering Jews around the world. And escalating anger at Muslims – how long before blameless Americans are targeted by would-be vigilantes simply for looking Arab?
A strike, targeted at one of the commanders and other Hamas participants in the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel, also murdered and maimed many innocents at a refugee camp reveals a leadership destitute of moral scruples.
Recently released video shows that Israeli troops have taken up where American soldiers left off with Abu Ghraib and that means Biden and pals are condoning torture of the worst kind, making Americans complicit in practices banned as immoral around the globe.
Stripping bound prisoners naked, jumping on their backs in an attempt to paralyze them, urinating on them, and sexual assault are grievous crimes and the individuals involved deserve to be sentenced as such, not glory in their heinous actions being circulated on social media. Not simply dismiss one commander in a token cover-up.
Issuing ultimatums to justify genocide is not a sign of responsible leadership. And is equally imbued with the purported religious imperative driving Hamas and other Arab terrorist groups.
What does the Old Testament say?
What does the Koran say?
When you salt the fields with cluster bombs, grenades and poison, who can grow crops?
Is it a prelude to the rapture some evangelicals believe imminent when all true Christians, dead or alive, are caught up off the earth and transformed to meet Christ in the air, when after seven years of tribulation Christ embodied will return victorious to reign over his enemies for a thousand years?
Ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages on the West Bank are being reported not by bleeding-heart American intellectuals but by Israeli humanitarian organizations.
Over 100 Palestinians on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem have been murdered and more than 2,000 injured in attacks by soldiers and settlers since the revenge mobilization began.
Israel has also used banned white phosphorous munitions in both Gaza and southern Lebanon which burns hot and long totally destroying homes and infrastructure and leaving human survivors with permanent scarring and lifelong pain.
As of the end of October, as reported by the Gaza Health Ministry and verified by UNICEF, Israeli forces have killed over ten thousand human beings in the enclave, mostly innocents including more than four thousand children with tens of thousands of others wounded.
At least a quarter of buildings in northern Gaza are damaged since Israel has deliberately chosen to extensively bomb the densely populated residential areas in which Hamas fighters might be hiding.
Israel’s two main goals were to destroy Hamas and free the hostages. What chance do they have to succeed at either?
Especially since, in the category of none is better than some, Israel reportedly refused to engage with Hamas on the release of 20 percent of their kidnapped countrymen in the days prior to the invasion of Gaza.
Despite protests demanding a cease-fire across the United States, the White House says that would legitimize the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli soil giving give Hamas a “propaganda win.” But what about Israel’s own legitimacy in perpetuating violence in the region?
The U.S. already funds the Israeli military to the tune of almost $4 billion a year and now Biden has requested that another $14 billion of our tax dollars be gifted to murderers and torturers.
Yes, the latter description applies equally to the Hamas fighters but I see no budgetary line item for them, just a pittance in humanitarian aid for the civilians of Gaza.
Has Israel bribed American officials and media to the extent that most of our elected officials can safely choose to ignore the public’s outrage at the equally evil atrocities perpetrated by Netanyahu’s government?
All the talking heads – elected officials and media pundits – lack nuance.
Why don’t we move Netanyahu, Atbaryan, Gallant, Yossian, Smotrich, all the American warmongers, and their families, into the center of Gaza City and make them sit down there with Hamas and UN peacekeepers until they work things out.
Maybe under the threat of Israeli rockets and Hamas insurgents, they can safely ignore the audiences they usually play to, and find within their hearts a shared commonality, an empathy that underscores how every faction is suffering, and from there pursue solutions that benefit all parties involved.
The key question is how to realistically address governance and reconstruction in the wake of this war that won’t initiate a downward spiral into another. And another.
If the participants don’t constructively resolve those issues, there can never be a winner, only a slew of aggrieved losers. And, after 9/11, Americans know far too well where that will lead.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
