Rage Over Gaza: Washington Will Pay for Its Support of Israel
A famous quote by Franz Kafka says, “Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”
The same principle, I believe, applies to any other powerful feeling, including resentment, hate, anger, even rage.
American officials should know this well as they continue to support Israel with billions of dollars of military and economic aid, and anything and everything that would allow Israel to continue with its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The Arabs, the Muslims – in fact, the whole world – are watching, listening, reading and are getting angrier by the day, at the direct American role in facilitating the Gaza bloodbath.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II” and “now sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history,” the Associated Press reported, based on recent satellite data analysis.
Aside from the tens of thousands of dead and missing in the rubble, even a higher number of people have been injured and maimed, including thousands of children. Countless children are left “grappling with the loss of an arm or a leg,” according to UNICEF.
This agony of Gaza is being watched on television and is also being viewed through every possible medium of communication. It is as if the world is suffering along with the Gaza children, but without being able to stop or slow down the genocide.
And, yet, even when all European countries, save a few, reversed their position on the war, joining the rest of the world in demanding an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire, Washington continued to reject these calls.
This is how US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, justified her country’s use of the veto, striking down the first serious attempt by the UN Security Council to achieve a permanent truce on October 18: “Israel has the inherent right of self-defense as reflected in Article 51 of the UN Charter.”
That same logic has been repeated many times by US officials since then, even when the extent of the Gaza tragedy became known to everyone, including the Americans themselves.
This self-serving logic goes against the very spirit of international and humanitarian law, which vehemently rejects the targeting of civilians during times of war and conflict, and the prevention of humanitarian aid from reaching civilian victims of war.
Indeed, the vast majority of Gaza’s victims are civilians and, according to UNICEF, over 70 percent of all of those killed and wounded are women and children.
Moreover, due to the inhumane Israeli practices, Gaza survivors are now dealing with an actual famine, an unprecedented event in the modern history of Palestine.
Yet, Israel continues to prevent the access to food, medicine, fuel and other urgent supplies to Gaza, thus violating Washington’s own laws on the matter.
“No assistance shall be furnished to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,” the US Foreign Assistance Act (Section 620I) states.
The Biden Administration has done nothing to pressure – let alone force – Israel to adhere to the most basic humanitarian laws in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. Worse, President Biden is furnishing Israel with the needed tools to prolong this destructive war.
According to a December 25 report by Israel’s Channel 12, more than 20 ships and 244 US airplanes have delivered over 10,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel since the start of the war.
These military supplies include, according to the Wall Street Journal, at least 100 BLU-109, 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, which have been repeatedly used throughout the Israeli war, killing and wounding hundreds each time.
The only tangible action that the US has taken since the start of the war was to create a coalition, named ‘Operation Prosperity Guardian’, with the sole purpose of ensuring the safety of ships crossing the Red Sea, into or from Israel.
The US, however, seems to have learned nothing from the past, from its devastating wars on Iraq, from the so-called ‘war on terror’, from its failure to find a balance between its support for Israel and its respect for Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. To the contrary, some US officials seem to be entirely detached from this reality.
At a press conference at the White House on December 7, US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, John Kirby, proclaimed: “Tell me, name me, one more nation, any other nation, that is doing as much as the United States to alleviate the pain and suffering of the people of Gaza. You can’t. You just can’t.”
But how are ‘dumb bombs’, ‘smart bombs’, bunker busters and tens of thousands of tons of explosives “alleviating the pain and suffering” of Gaza and her children?
If Kirby is unaware of his country’s role in the genocide in Gaza, then the crisis in American foreign policy is worse than we could have imagined. If he is aware, and he should be, then his country’s moral crisis is arguably unprecedented in modern history.
The problem in US politics is that American administrations have a segmented view of reality, as they are intently focused on how their action, or inaction, is going to affect their political parties in future elections.
But Americans who care about their country and its position in a vastly changing Middle East and rapidly shifting global geopolitics should remember that history neither starts nor finishes on a fixed November date, once every four years.
“In the end, love will return in a different way,” Kafka wrote. He is right. But hate, too, tends to return as well, manifesting itself in myriad ways. More than any other country, Washington should have come to that realization on its own.
From Gaza to Congo: How Palestinians Became Victims of Zionist History
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Thousands of miles separate Uganda and Congo from the Gaza Strip, but these places are connected to Palestine in ways that traditional geopolitical analyses would fail to explain.
On January 3, it was revealed that the far-right Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is actively discussing proposals to expel millions of Palestinians to African countries, in exchange for a fixed price.
The discussion on expelling millions of Gazans has supposedly entered the mainstream thinking in Israel starting on October 7. But the fact that this discussion remains active over three months since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza indicates that the Israeli proposals are not an outcome of a specific historical moment, for example, Al-Aqsa Flood operation.
Even a quick glance at Israeli historical records point to the fact that the mass expulsion of Palestinians – known in Israel as ‘Transfer’ – was, and remains, a major Israeli strategy which aims at fixing Israel’s so-called ‘demographic problem’.
Long before fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other Palestinian movements stormed the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel on October 7, Israeli politicians discussed, in fact on many occasions, how to reduce the overall Palestinian population to maintain the demographic Jewish majority in historic Palestine.
The idea was not only confined to Israel’s extremists, but was discussed even by the likes of former Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman when he suggested in 2014 a proposal for ‘population exchange plan’.
Even supposedly liberal intellectuals and historians have supported this idea, both in principle and practice.
A top Israeli historian, Benny Morris, has regretted in an interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in January 2004, that Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, failed to expel all Palestinians during the Nakba – the catastrophic event of murder and ethnic cleansing that led to the creation of the state of Israel on top of Palestinian towns and villages.
Another proof that the idea of ‘Transfer’ was not concocted on the spur of the moment is the fact that comprehensive plans were immediately produced after October 7. They include a position paper published by the Israeli think tank the ‘Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy’ on October 17 and a report released three days later by the Israeli news outlet, Calcalist, which outlined a document proposing the same strategy.
The fact that Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries openly and immediately declared their total rejection of expelling Palestinians indicates the degree of seriousness of those official Israeli proposals.
“Our problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” Netanyahu said on January 2.
These comments were followed by others, including a statement by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich when he said “What needs to be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage emigration.”
It was then that the Israeli official discourse adopted the term ‘voluntary migration’. But there is nothing voluntary about the starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians, who continue to face an ongoing genocide, and are being pushed systematically toward the border region between Gaza and Egypt.
In its legal case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the government of South Africa included the planned ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Tel Aviv as one of the main points listed by Pretoria, accusing Israel of genocide.
Due to the lack of enthusiasm on the part of pro-Israel Western countries, Israeli diplomats are circumventing the globe looking for governments which are willing to accept ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.
Imagine if this behavior stemmed from any other country in the world; a country that murders people en masse, yet shops around looking for other states to accept the expelled survivors in exchange for cash.
Not only has Israel made a mockery of international law, but they have also set whole new standards of despicable behavior by any state, anywhere in the world, in any time in history, ancient or modern.
And yet, the world continues to watch, support, as in the case of the US, or gently or vehemently protest, but without taking a single meaningful action to stop the bloodbath in Gaza, or to block the terrifying scenarios that could truly follow if the war does not end.
But there is one thing that many people might not know, the Zionist movement, the very ideological institution that established Israel had attempted to move the world’s Jewery to Africa, to establish a state, prior to the choice of Palestine as the ‘Jewish homeland’.
This was called the ‘Uganda Scheme’ of 1903. It was raised by Theodor Hertzl, the founder of Zionism, at the Sixth Zionist Congress. It was based on a proposal put forth by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain.
The Uganda Scheme eventually fell through, but the Zionists continued to shop for some other place, finally, to the misfortune of the Palestinians, settling on Palestine.
If one is to compare the genocidal language of Israeli leaders of today, study their racist references to Palestinians, one is to locate a major overlap between their collective perception and the way that Jewish communities were perceived by Europeans for hundreds of years.
The sudden Zionist interest in Congo as a potential ‘homeland’ for Palestinians further illustrates the point that the Zionist movement continues to live in the shadow of its own history, projecting the racism practiced against Jews in Israel’s own racism against innocent Palestinians.
On January 5, Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu proposed that Israelis “must find ways for Gazans that are more painful than death.” One does not need to struggle to find historical references of similar language, used by German Nazis in their depiction of Jews in the early half of the 20th century.
If history does repeat itself, it has an odd, and unkind way of doing so.
We have been told that the world has learned from the mass killings of previous wars, including the Holocaust and other WWII atrocities. Yet, it seems that the lessons have largely gone unlearned. Not only is Israel now assuming the role of the mass killer but the rest of the Western world continues to play the role assigned to them in this historical tragedia. They are either cheering, politely protesting, or doing nothing at all.
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Ramzy Baroud is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle (1999-present), former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, former Editor-in-Chief of The Brunei Times and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera online. Baroud’s work has been published in hundreds of newspapers and journals worldwide, and is the author of six books and a contributor to many others. Baroud is also a regular guest on many television and radio programs including RT, Al Jazeera, CNN International, BBC, ABC Australia, National Public Radio, Press TV, TRT, and many other stations. Baroud was inducted as an Honorary Member into the Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, NU OMEGA Chapter of Oakland University, Feb 18, 2020.
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