Biden’s State of Union Echoes Israeli Talking Points on the Mass Killing of Palestinian Men, Women and Children
No, President Biden, 2 Million Gazans Are Not Being Used as Human Shields. But Even If They Were, That Wouldn’t Excuse Using Starvation and Disease as Weapons of War
One hundred thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed or wounded by Israeli bombing and shelling. Of the 30,000 dead, 20,000 were women and children. Ninety percent of the population of Gaza is in “imminent risk of famine,” one in four people are starving according to the United Nations, and unknown numbers have already succumbed. The babies of thousands of women “who are due to give birth in the next month in the Gaza Strip are at risk of dying,” according to the United Nations children's fund.
Meanwhile, President Biden – even while expressing concern over the innocent lives lost – won’t insist Israel end its blockade of food, water and medical supplies. Instead, in his State of the Union speech, Biden adopted the Israel government’s “human shield” excuse for the suffering.
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Even if it were true that Hamas deliberately tried to use civilians as a shield, what has that to do with denying food and water to the people of Gaza? Nothing. At the outset of the war, Israel’s Defense Minister proclaimed that Gaza would receive “no food, no water.” This wasn’t because Hamas was about to use Palestinian civilians as shields. Nor was the “no food, no water” plan necessary for Israel’s “self-defense.” It was because Israel wanted to punish everyone in Gaza for Hamas’s attack.
Under international pressure, Israel allowed some aid into Gaza – but in pitifully small amounts: Before the war, 500 to 600 trucks of food and other supplies entered Gaza every day; recently it was down to 98 per day.
Deliberately creating a famine has nothing to do with Hamas’s supposed “human shield” tactics. What end does it serve?
As the Deputy Speaker of Israel’s Knesset (legislature) explained, “We all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israeli Major General Giora Eiland explained that the enemy is “not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population who enthusiastically supported Hamas . . .” It follows that schools and hospitals must be attacked whether or not Hamas is using them to conceal weapons.
Should the entire civilian population of Gaza be treated as Israel’s enemy because they allegedly “support” Hamas? The last election in Gaza took place in 2006. This means that no one in Gaza who is today under the age of 36 (78% of Gazans) was even of voting age when Hamas “won” power with just 44% of the vote. Not that those who did vote for Hamas in 2006 deserves to be starved as punishment for their vote.
Babies and small children are likeliest to succumb.
Lethal epidemics threaten Gaza. Epidemiologists warn that another 85,000 Palestinians could die of disease and injuries in the next six months.
Babies and small children are likeliest to succumb. With 90 percent of children under five affected by infectious diseases and nearly all of them suffering malnutrition, “The Gaza Strip is poised to witness an explosion in preventable child deaths which would compound the already unbearable level of child deaths in Gaza,” a UNICEF official warned. Preventable, if Israel allows in sufficient food, water and medical supplies. But it won’t. As the Israeli Major General quoted earlier explained, “In order to make the siege effective, we have to prevent others from giving assistance to Gaza.” What has this to do with human shields?
Israeli military attacks have driven 1.4 million Palestinian civilians into the city of Rafah in southern Gaza. With no clean water and insufficient sanitary facilities for the suddenly exploded refugee population, human waste is overwhelming the make-shift toilets, leading to cases of Hepatitis A and cholera. Nonetheless, Israel won’t allow UNICEF to bring in portable toilets and materials to build sanitation facilities to reduce the danger.
An Israeli Major General argues “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”
Obviously this has nothing to do with Hamas using civilians as “human shields.” Nor with“self-defense.” If we judge Israel’s government by its actions and their natural consequences, we can only conclude that Israel, having primed Gaza for an outbreak of cholera and other potentially lethal diseases, is ready and eager for it to happen.
Does this sound exaggerated? Not to many Israelis. Major General Eiland has expressly argued that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.” Many members of the Knesset have called for Gaza to be “erased,” and “crushed . . . on all its inhabitants.” Israeli parliamentarians have asserted that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves” and “there should be one sentence for everyone there – death.”
Hamas was the ruling government in densely populated Gaza before the Israeli invasion, so it is not surprising Hamas’s government officials and administrators, as well as its soldiers, lived close to the civilian population. That doesn’t mean they were using civilians as shields. But if they had been, that still wouldn’t excuse the slaying of innocents. If a killer seeks to escape by hiding in a crowd of innocent people, the police don’t have the right to spray the crowd with machine gun fire to stop the killer.
Israeli officials’ statements “not in conformity with government policy.”
In response to the South African charge that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza, Israel’s defender in the International Court of Justice claimed that the views quoted above (and many other similar expressions by Israeli officials) are “not in conformity with government policy.” But we don’t require an official admission to conclude that a government is engaged in deliberate mass murder to eliminate a people. Even Adolf Hitler did not officially announce to the German people, “We are killing all the Jews.”
And in chilling truth, Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu came remarkably close to such an announcement. In a nationally broadcast speech shortly before the Israeli invasion of Gaza, Netanyahu invoked the Biblical story of the destruction of Amalek by the Israelites, stating: “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”
The Amalekites were a rival nation to the ancient Israelites, and in the Bible God commands:
“Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (1 Samuel 15:2-3.)
Netanyahu repeated the point directly to those going to war in Gaza, in a November 3, 2023 message to Israeli soldiers: “Remember what Amalek did to you.” If this was not a call for genocide, what was it?
This is the Israel that confronts the largely defenseless civilian population of Gaza. This is the Israel that has created a famine, that nurtures an epidemic, that is untroubled by the death of Palestinian children.
This is the Israel whose war on Gaza is supported by American money and American arms and ammunition. This is the Israel to which President Biden, shamefully, continues to give unconditional support. This American Jew says no. Not in my name.
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Why aren’t you looking at Trump’s and Netanyahu’s role in this? Trump and Netanyahu (along with family friends Jared & IVANKA Kushner) PROVOKED this backlash by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Trump wanted to pander to the conservative Jewish voters; Netanyahu did this to pander to his right-wing extremists. . . All this was done DESPITE warnings from seasoned experts on Middle East diplomacy.
The Hamas response was predictable—hell, I predicted it.
And NOT coincidentally, Putin personally drove in the convoy that invaded Crimea on that same day.
It was a tit-for-tat exchange.
So quit it already about blaming Pres. Biden for the fallout and focus on the players who PROVOKED THIS WAR.